Dissent in courts has always existed. It is natural and healthy that judges disagree on legal issues of a certain importance and difficulty. The question is if it is reasonable to conceal dissent. Not every legal system allows judges to explain their disagreement to the public in a separate opinion attached to the judgment of the court. Most constitutional courts do. This book presents a comparative analysis of the practice of judicial dissent in constitutional courts from the perspective of the civil law tradition. It discusses the theoretical background, presents the history of the institution and today’s practice, thus laying down the basis for an accurate consideration of the phenomenon from a legal perspective.

Challenging the conventional wisdom that constitutional courts are the best device that democratic systems have for the protection of individual rights, Wojciech Sadurski examines carefully the most recent wave of activist constitutional courts: those that have emerged after the fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe. In contrast to most other analysts and scholars he does not take for granted that they are a "force for the good", but rather subjects them to critical scrutiny against the background of a wide-ranging comparative and theoretical analysis of constitutional judicial review in the modern world. He shows that, in the region of Central and Eastern Europe, their record in protecting constitutional rights has been mixed, and their impact upon the vibrancy of democratic participation and public discourse about controversial issues often negative. Sadurski urges us to reconsider the frequently unthinking enthusiasm for the imposition of judicial limits upon constitutional democracy. In the end, his reflections go to the very heart of the fundamental dilemma of constitutionalism and political theory: how best to find the balance between constitutionalism and democracy? The lively, if imperfect, democracies in Central and Eastern Europe provide a fascinating terrain for raising this question, and testing traditional answers. This innovative, wide-ranging and thought-provoking book will become essential reading for scholars and students alike in the fields of comparative constitutionalism and political theory, particularly for those with an interest in legal and political developments in the postcommunist world

This book analyses the specificity of the law-making activity of European constitutional courts. The main hypothesis is that currently constitutional courts are positive legislators whose position in the system of State organs needs to be redefined. The book covers the analysis of the law-making activity of four constitutional courts in Western countries: Germany, Italy, Spain, and France; and six constitutional courts in Central–East European countries: Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovak Republic, Latvia, and Bulgaria; as well as two international courts: the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). The work thus identifies the mutual interactions between national constitutional courts and international tribunals in terms of their law-making activity. The chosen countries include constitutional courts which have been recently captured by populist governments and subordinated to political powers. Therefore, one of the purposes of the book is to identify the change in the law-making activity of those courts and to compare it with the activity of constitutional courts from countries in which democracy is not viewed as being under threat. Written by national experts, each chapter addresses a series of set questions allowing accessible and meaningful comparison. The book will be a valuable resource for students, academics, and policy-makers working in the areas of constitutional law and politics.

Common-law judgments tend to be more than merely judgments, for judges often make pronouncements that they need not have made had they kept strictly to the task in hand. Why do they do this? The Intricacies of Dicta and Dissent examines two such types of pronouncement, obiter dicta and dissenting opinions, primarily as aspects of English case law. Neil Duxbury shows that both of these phenomena have complex histories, have been put to a variety of uses, and are not amenable to being straightforwardly categorized as secondary sources of law. This innovative and unusual study casts new light on – and will prompt lawyers to pose fresh questions about – the common law tradition and the nature of judicial decision-making.

Central European Constitutional Courts in the Face of EU Membership explores German legal influence on other systems of constitutional justice, concentrating on the impact of the Federal Constitutional Court’s approach to EU integration on constitutional courts in Hungary and Poland.

Recent confrontations between constitutional courts and parliamentary majorities in several European countries have attracted international interest in the relationship between the judiciary and the legislature. Some political actors have argued that courts have assumed too much power and politics has been extremely judicialized. This volume accurately and systematically examines the extent to which this aggregation of power may have constrained the dominant political actors’ room for manoeuvre. To explore the diversity and measure the strength of judicial decisions, the contributors to this work have elaborated a methodology to give a more nuanced picture of the practice of constitutional adjudication in Central and Eastern Europe between 1990 and 2020. The work opens with an assessment of the existing literature on empirical analysis of judicial decisions with a special focus on the Central and Eastern European region, and a short summary of the methodology of the project. This is followed by ten country studies and a concluding chapter providing a comprehensive comparative analysis of the results. A further nine countries are explored in the counterpart volume to this book: Constitutional Review in Western Europe: Judicial-Legislative Relations in Comparative Perspective. The collection will be an invaluable resource for those working in the areas of empirical legal research and comparative constitutional law, as well as political scientists interested in judicial politics.

Víctor Ferreres Comella contrasts the European 'centralised' constitutional court model, in which one court system is used to adjudicate constitutional questions, with a decentralised model such as that of the United States, in which courts deal with both constitutional and non-constitutional questions.

Recent confrontations between constitutional courts and parliamentary majorities, for example in Poland and Hungary, have attracted international interest in the relationship between the judiciary and the legislature in Central and Eastern European countries. Several political actors have argued that courts have assumed too much power after the democratic transformation process in 1989/1990. These claims are explicitly or implicitly connected to the charge that courts have constrained the room for manoeuvre of the legislatures too heavily and that they have entered the field of politics. Nevertheless, the question to what extent has this aggregation of power constrained the dominant political actors has never been examined accurately and systematically in the literature. The present volume fills this gap by applying an innovative research methodology to quantify the impact and effect of court’s decisions on legislation and legislators, and measure the strength of judicial decisions in six CEE countries.

“Highly illuminating ... for anyone interested in the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the American democracy, lawyer and layperson alike." —The Los Angeles Review of Books In his major work, acclaimed historian and judicial authority Melvin Urofsky examines the great dissents throughout the Court’s long history. Constitutional dialogue is one of the ways in which we as a people reinvent and reinvigorate our democratic society. The Supreme Court has interpreted the meaning of the Constitution, acknowledged that the Court’s majority opinions have not always been right, and initiated a critical discourse about what a particular decision should mean before fashioning subsequent decisions—largely through the power of dissent. Urofsky shows how the practice grew slowly but steadily, beginning with the infamous and now overturned case of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) during which Chief Justice Roger Taney’s opinion upheld slavery and ending with the present age of incivility, in which reasoned dialogue seems less and less possible. Dissent on the court and off, Urofsky argues in this major work, has been a crucial ingredient in keeping the Constitution alive and must continue to be so.

The power of national and transnational constitutional courts to issue binding rulings in interpreting the constitution or an international treaty has been endlessly discussed. What does it mean for democratic governance that non-elected judges influence politics and policies? The authors of Judicial Power - legal scholars, political scientists, and judges - take a fresh look at this problem. To date, research has concentrated on the legitimacy, or the effectiveness, or specific decision-making methods of constitutional courts. By contrast, the authors here explore the relationship among these three factors. This book presents the hypothesis that judicial review allows for a method of reflecting on social integration that differs from political methods, and, precisely because of the difference between judicial and political decision-making, strengthens democratic governance. This hypothesis is tested in case studies on the role of constitutional courts in political transformations, on the methods of these courts, and on transnational judicial interactions.