Constitutional Review in Western Europe

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. Yet the extent to which this aggregation of power may have constrained the dominant political actors' room for manoeuvre has never been examined accurately and systematically. This volume fills this gap in the literature. To explore the diversity and measure the strength of judicial decisions, the authors have elaborated a new methodology that is intended to give a more nuanced picture of the practice of constitutional adjudication in Europe. The work opens with an assessment of the existing literature on empirical analysis of judicial decisions with a special focus on Western Europe and a short summary of the methodology of the project. This is followed by 11 country studies and a concluding chapter providing a comprehensive comparative analysis of the results. A further ten countries are explored in the counterpart volume to this book: Constitutional Review in Central and Eastern 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.

Kálmán Pócza is a Senior Research Fellow at the LUDOVIKA University of Public Service in Budapest, Hungary (Research Institute for Government and Politics), and Head of the Center for Constitutional Politics at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium. He is the Principal Investigator of the JUDICON-EU project (https://judiconeu.uni-nke.hu/).

List of figures. List of tables. List of contributors. Abbreviations Chapter 1: Constitutional review and judicial-legislative relations in established democracies. Chapter 2: The Austrian Constitutional Court: A human rights stronghold despite increasing judicial restraint. Chapter 3: The Belgian Constitutional Court: Navigating between constitutional rights and consociational politics. Chapter 4: The Supreme Court of Cyprus: The centre of gravity within the separation of powers. Chapter 5: The French Constitutional Council: The gradual emergence of a co-legislator? Chapter 6: The German Federal Constitutional Court: A court unbound? Chapter 7: The Superior Courts of Ireland: Judicial restraint in a stable political environment. Chapter 8: The Italian Constitutional Court: A powerful political institution. Chapter 9: The Portuguese Constitutional Court: A cautious but effective judicial body. Chapter 10: The Spanish Constitutional Court: The judicial politics of constitutional review and interpretation. Chapter 11: The United Kingdom Supreme Court: Radical outcomes from gradualist premises. Chapter 12: The Nordic courts: An example of cooperation and dialogue. Chapter 13: Western European constitutional courts in comparative perspective 1990-2020. Index