Part VI Institutions, Ch.38 Constitutional Courts

Prior to the Second World War, only a handful of high courts in the world had routinely exercised the power of constitutional judicial review: the authority to invalidate statutes and other acts of public authority found to be in conflict with a constitution. In the 1950s, Western Europe began to emerge as the epicenter of a ‘new constitutionalism’,1 a model of democracy and state legitimacy that rejects the dogmas of legislative sovereignty, prioritizes fundamental rights, and requires a mode of constitutional review. With successive waves of democratization,...