by removing the requirement of physician authorisation. For those who are open to a serious reflection on the issues at stake in abortion, from the moral status of prenatal life to the real conditions for women’s autonomy and the actual experience of what is taking place in the British and Dutch abortion clinics, this book offers a mine of relevant sources of information. It offers an argument which does not conceal its commitments but clearly lays out its premises and conclusions. Unlike many other publications on this fraught topic, it is not polemical. It does not attempt to persuade by shock or horror stories, or by vilifying opponents on the other side of the argument. Above all, it acknowledges the complexity of the issues and the need to consider the great range of factors in coming to a judgment about induced abortion and what might be done to reduce its occurrence. Patrick Riordan SJ teaches in Heythrop Institute for Religion and Society, Heythrop College. The Supreme Court, Ruadhán Mac Cormaic (Dublin: Penguin Ireland, 2016), viii+456 pages. In Ireland, the Supreme Court has the ultimate power to declare legislation unconstitutional. Viewed positively, this helps to ensure that our political community holds itself to shared fundamental values. Viewed negatively, it allows a small unrepresentative elite to impose its values on the rest of society. Either way, the Supreme Court is a significant constitutional and political actor. Constitutional theorists grapple with the moral questions raised by this power of judicial review. Can such an apparently undemocratic practice ever be justified? How should the Constitution be interpreted? When is self-restraint on the part of judges required? But there are equally important questions about who exercises this power and how they do so. Ruadhán Mac Cormaic’s excellent book sheds light on these questions. The Supreme Court is not a constitution-drafter: it does not sit down to write constitutional law. Rather, the court makes constitutional law through deciding cases. Citizens hire lawyers to take cases challenging state actions, the state responds and the court decides. But this linear account oversimplifies : sometimes it is lawyers and lobby groups who seek citizens to take cases, rather than the other way around. Occasionally, the court sends signals Studies • volume 106 • number 422 233 Summer 2017: Book Reviews to lawyers about the sorts of law it might make in the future, prompting the search for appropriate litigants. The state does not simply react to decisions of the court but rather attempts to tailor its actions in anticipation of those decisions. The court is acutely conscious of how the state and broader community will respond to its decisions. The Supreme Court therefore exists in a complex web of mutually regarding personal relationships, all parties shaping their own actions in response not only to the actions of others but also to the anticipated actions of others. Mac Cormaic’s book brings this story of mutually regarding relationships to life. The book takes a broadly chronological approach, starting with the foundation of the state in 1922. The early chapters address the emergence of the Irish Free State, de Valera’s dismantling of the constitutional relationships with the United Kingdom and the enactment of the new Constitution in 1937. The Irish Free State Constitution proved an unsatisfactory document in many ways. For nationalists, it was tainted by the British influence on both its content and mode of enactment. A more practical problem was that any provision, other than those required by the Anglo-Irish Treaty, could be amended by legislation of the Oireachtas. This rendered the Constitution largely ineffective for the protection of constitutional rights, since the Oireachtas could circumvent any judicial interpretation simply by enacting new legislation to amend the Constitution. Mac Cormaic’s narrative highlights how, in contrast to the fragility of the 1922 Constitution, the new court system of the Irish Free State proved remarkably robust and durable. With the Supreme Court at its apex, this court system has existed in more or less the same form to the present day (p.24). The scope for judicial activism was initially limited by the constitutional fragility of the Irish Free State and a conservative judicial...
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