Courts and Judicial Review

Abstract

The legal culture, political context, and organization of any one national state is key to apprehending the role of courts and judicial review in upholding the rule of law and the administrative state. Constitutional principles like the separation of powers, basic rights, and governance priorities like efficiency will shape the scope, intensity, and grounds of judicial review, which actors are susceptible to it, and questions of standing. Different ideological communities place varying emphasis on these factors. Models of judicial review, based on the French special administrative courts or English common law courts of general jurisdiction, were first developed in Western liberal democracies. These have been influential exports beyond Europe, although susceptible to autochthonous adaptations informed by local culture and exigencies. This chapter examines the chief features of courts and judicial review in Western liberal democracies, where the function of judicial review has gone beyond ensuring legality and conformity of administrative processes to standards of substantive and procedural fairness, to include protecting fundamental rights and promoting participatory democracy in the rule-making process. It examines how judicial review operates, similarly or distinctly, under other government regimes beyond liberal democratic orders, within non-liberal developmental states with communitarian cultures and socialist legal systems.