One of the most important political developments in the past several decades has
been a worldwide trend towards the “judicialization of politics,” which has been
described by political scientists as “one of the most significant developments in
comparative politics” and “one of the most significant trends in late-twentieth and early-
twenty-first-century government.”
This judicialization of politics and expansion of
judicial power is driven in large part by the establishment of new constitutional courts in
dozens of countries where none had previously existed. At the close of the Second World
War, only four countries in the world had legal institutions empowered to perform
judicial review, the practice whereby courts examine and strike down laws that are
deemed to violate the constitution.
But over the past half century, constitutional courts
with powers of judicial review were established worldwide, first in post-war Western
Europe in an effort to better safeguard fundamental rights, and more recently with the
“third wave” of democratization and neo-liberal economic reform that has swept much of
Latin America, Asia, Eastern Europe, and parts of Africa. Simultaneously, judicial
power emerged at the supranational level, with the European Court of Justice (ECJ)
providing perhaps the clearest example of how supranational judicial institutions are
beginning to fundamentally reshape the state (and the nation-state system).
vast expansion in administrative courts has occurred in many states. The effect of these
new judicial institutions at the national and the supranational level, on both political
processes and in substantive policy outcomes is, in many cases, nothing short of
1
James Gibson, Gregory Caldeira, and Vanessa Baird, “On the Legitimacy of National High Courts”
American Political Science Review, vol. 92 (1998), p. 343; Neal Tate and Torbjorn Vallinder, eds., The
Global Expansion of Judicial Power (New York: New York University Press, 1995).
2
Courts in Australia, Canada, Switzerland, and the United States. A few other countries had judicial
institutions with formal review powers, but they seldom, if ever, made use of those powers.
3
For good overviews judicial power at the supranational level, see International Organization, vol. on the
“Legalization and World Politics”; Anne-Marie Slaughter, “Judges: Constructing a Global Legal System”
in A New World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 65-103; Alec Stone Sweet,
Governing with Judges: Constitutional Politics in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
2
Convention