Responsive Judicial Review: Author meets Reader

In her new book, Responsive Judicial Review: Democracy and Dysfunction in the Modern Age, Rosalind Dixon provides a new ‘responsive’ account of judicial review that is an inheritor to John Hart Ely‘s idea of judicial review as representation-reinforcing, but takes a wider and more substantive view of the potential sources of democratic dysfunction in constitutional systems worldwide, as well of the potential limits on court’s capacity to counter them. It proposes a form of review calibrated to responding both to the risks of democratic monopoly, blind spots, and burdens of inertia in the legislative process, and of judicially created democratic inertia, backlash and debilitation – or that is flexible and weak-strong in nature. It also invites attention to questions of judicial statecraft and the global reach of a constitutional theory of this kind. This panel explores these themes through conversation between Dixon and other leading theorists of judicial review.