Conference on Comparative Judicial Review
Friday-Saturday, October 7-8, 2016
Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, 375 East Chicago Avenue, Chicago, IL 60611
Co-convened by Erin Delaney (Northwestern) and Rosalind Dixon (UNSW)
Participants | Schedule | Materials (login required)
Constitutional courts around the world play an increasingly central role in day to day democratic governance. Yet comparative constitutional scholars have only recently begun to develop the interdisciplinary analysis needed to understand this shift in the constitutional law-politics relationship. This conference, and the associated edited volume (to be published by Edward Elgar Press in 2017), attempts to address this gap by bringing together the leading scholars of constitutional law and politics to provide a comprehensive overview of existing understandings of this question. Together, the papers associated with the conference will also serve as a single-point of entry for legal scholars and practitioners interested in understanding the field of comparative judicial review in its broader political and social context.
The conference will examine theories of judicial review as a form of political insurance; a democratic hedging device; a means of mediating political conflict in divided societies; a response to a principal-agent problem; a mechanism for promoting public reason-giving; or a means of satisfying individual demands for a hearing. It will consider accounts of judicial review as constrained by a particular political 'tolerance interval'; shaped by dynamics of inter-branch competition or competition between rival military or authoritarian as well as democratic elites; supported by a form of co-ordination game between rival political elites; constructed by the federal versus unitary nature of democratic politics; or shaped by the actions of courts themselves as well as the political branches. It will review central themes in judicial review, across countries, such as the use of constitutional history in constitutional interpretation, proportionality doctrines, negative versus positive (or first versus second generation) rights enforcement, and ideas of weak versus strong form judicial review. It will also address the relationship between judicial review in a domestic constitutional context, and the politics of comparative constitutional citation, as well as obedience to international law.
In Partnership with:
Conference Participants
Karen Alter, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
Steven G. Calabresi, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
Erin F. Delaney, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
Tom Daly, University of Edinburgh, Centre for Constitutional Law
Rosalind Dixon, University of New South Wales
David Fontana, George Washington University Law School
Alon Harel, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Ran Hirschl, University of Toronto
Aziz Huq, University of Chicago Law School
Samuel Issacharoff, New York University School of Law
Tonja Jacobi, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law
Madhav Khosla, Harvard University
David E. Landau, Florida State University College of Law
Yi-Li Lee, Harvard University
Hanna Lerner, Tel Aviv University
Sonia Mittal, Stanford University
Theunis Roux, University of New South Wales
Virgilio Afonso da Silva, University of São Paulo
Richard Stacey, University of Toronto
Kristen A. Stilt, Harvard Law School
Yvonne Tew, Georgetown Law
Mariana Velasco Rivera, Yale Law School
Salma Waheedi, Harvard Law School
Barry R. Weingast, Stanford University
Emily Zackin, John Hopkins University
Schedule
Friday, October 7
8:45 am - 9:15 am Continental Breakfast and Welcome in Rubloff 339
9:15 am - 11:00 am Session 1: Judicial Review - Institutions, Tools & Interpretive Challenges in Global
Perspective
Wen-Chen Chang & Yi-Li Lee
Beyond Europe and the United States: The Wide World of Supreme and Constitutional
Courts
Virgilio Afonso da Silva
Comparative Approaches to Constitutional History
Jamal Greene & Yvonne Tew
Discussant: Aziz Huq
11:00 am - 11:30 am Coffee Break/Morning Tea
11:30 am - 1:15 pm Session 2: The Origins & Functions of Judicial Review
Comparative Constitutional Insurance
Tom Ginsburg & Rosalind Dixon
Comparative Constitutional Law as a Window on Democratic Institutions
Samuel Issacharoff
The Right to a Hearing and Judicial Review: Comparative Constitutional Realities
Alon Harel & Adam Shinar
Discussant: Richard Stacey
1:15 pm - 2:15 pm Lunch in the Faculty Commons
2:15 pm - 3:45 pm Session 3: Origins & Functions II
Interpreting Constitutions in Divided Societies
Hanna Lerner
The Supreme Court as Coordinator-in-Chief: Judicial Review as a Self-Stabilizing
Constitutional Mechanism
Tonja Jacobi, Sonia Mittal & Barry R. Weingast
The De-Judicialization of Politics
Mila Versteeg & Emily Zackin
Discussant: Tom Daly
3:45 pm - 4:15 pm Coffee Break/Afternoon Tea
4:15 pm - 5:45 pm Session 4: Judicial Review & Its Political Context
Judicial Review and the Politics of Comparative Citation: Theory, Evidence &
Methodological Challenges
Ran Hirschl
Judicial Review in the Context of Constitutional Islam
Kristen A. Stilt & Salma Waheedi
The Origins and Growth of Judicial Enforcement
Steven Calabresi
Discussant: David Fontana
Saturday, October 8
9:00 am - 9:30 am Buffet Breakfast in Rubloff 339
9:30 am - 11:15 am Session 5: Judicial Review & Its Political Context
International Constitutional Review: Three Optics
Karen Alter
A Typological Theory of Judicial Review Regime Change
Theunis Roux
Courts and Support Structures: Rethinking the Standard Narrative
David E. Landau
Discussants: Mariana Velasco Rivera & Madhav Khosla
11:15 am - 11:30 am Conclusions