Constitutional Theory Seminar. 3 credits

Catalog description

The subject of our course is the legitimacy and desirability of judicial review. The first part of the course will explore different schools of constitutional thought (e.g., living constitutionalism and originalism), asking how each of them justifies judicial review and how those justifications inform their approaches to constitutional interpretation. The second part of the course will explore the actual practice of judicial review by different courts around the world, asking which, if any, of the normative theories can justify judicial review as practiced. (One of the most important and yet largely unknown developments in global government over the last thirty or eighty years, depending on how one counts, is the global spread of judicial review.) The goal is to see whether any of the normative theories has descriptive uptake and, if not, to ask anew whether judicial review can be justified, not in the abstract, but as practiced.Offered by Law. May not be repeated for credit.