Supreme Court UK

4 Key excerpts on "Supreme Court UK"

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  eBook - ePub

  Essentials Of American Politics

  • David Mckay(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  12The Supreme Court and Judicial Politics

  We are very quiet there but it is the quiet of a storm center.

  —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, 1902–1932

  In a democracy, politics is a process of popular education—the task of adjusting the conflicting interests of diverse groups,… and thereby the hostility and suspicion and ignorance engendered by group interests… toward mutual understanding.

  —Felix Frankfurter, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, 1939–1962

  In all societies, the courts play some political role. In liberal democracies where the independence of the judiciary is regarded as essential to prevent the exercise of irresponsible executive (and sometimes legislative) power, the political role of the courts as interpreters of the law and as defenders of individual freedoms is well established. In despotic and one-party states, courts are political in the quite different sense that they are the instruments of a dominant executive.

  However, there are also important distinctions within liberal democratic states, the most crucial being the presence or absence of judicial review. As was noted in Chapter 3 , judicial review is long established in the United States, and the Supreme Court is the final arbiter of the meaning of the Constitution. Hence, all laws passed by the state and national legislatures, together with all executive actions, are subject to review by the courts, which judge their compatibility with the Constitution. As the final court of appeal, therefore, the Supreme Court has the legal power to declare any action by any other branch of government unconstitutional.

  This apparently formidable power is tempered by a number of factors, but in contrast to many other liberal democracies, the United States has a system that entails enormous potential judicial power. In the United Kingdom, for example, the courts can review executive actions—but only by testing them in relation to the content of acts of Parliament. This can produce sharp rebukes for governments when the courts judge that the government has acted ultra vires (beyond its powers), and the British courts are becoming more active in reviewing executive actions. A British Parliament controlled by the executive can, however, always reverse a judicial judgment, as sovereignty lies not in the Constitution but in Parliament. In the United States, a decision of the Supreme Court involving the constitutionality of a statute or governmental action can be overturned only by constitutional amendment (or by the Court itself, of course), and as was shown in Chapter 3

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  The Constitution of the United Kingdom

  A Contextual Analysis

  • Peter Leyland(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  In fact, the position has been exactly the reverse in regard to the US Supreme Court. The US Supreme Court exercises a constitutional review function and, unlike the UK courts, it has the power to oversee the constitution and to declare legislation invalid. This has projected the Court into the forefront of political controversy on many occasions. 40 Most obviously in recent times it was the US Supreme Court that finally had to decide the validity of the contested presidential election result in the year 2000 in the case of Bush v Gore. 41 The political dimension of the Supreme Court’s role has resulted in deliberate attempts by US Presidents to select judicial candidates with views that appear to correspond to their own. 42 An obvious danger in making any such reform in the UK to the system of judicial appointments was introducing any form of political interference into the process. The central objection made by Professor Griffith to the types of appointments to the judicial bench during the 1970s and 1980s concerned the elevation to the higher judiciary of a public school Oxbridge-educated elite section of society, nearly all of whom had experienced a similar legal training. 43 Contemporary critics such as Lady Hale no longer view the problem mainly in terms of social class, but rather identify the need to appoint judges who are more representative of society as a whole. 44 LCs have increasingly recognised the importance of placing increasing emphasis on equality and diversity as well as the accepted qualities of integrity and judicial quality understood in terms of intellectual ability. 45 Despite the changes to the appointments system discussed below, and close monitoring of who is appointed, there is still an under-representation of women and ethnic minorities at the highest judicial

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  Constitutional Law and Precedent

  International Perspectives on Case-Based Reasoning

  • Monika Florczak-Wątor(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  100 in most cases the Court confirmed the finality of its decisions. The significant position of its precedents does not mean that the justices are continuously overturning federal and state legislation, or modifying the meaning of the supreme law of the land. The unique character of this institution and its jurisprudence lies in its potential to determine almost all matters concerning legal, political, social, or economic relations which are written in, or which can be derived from, the Constitution. The use of judicial review, founded in the early years of American statehood and actively exercised since the 1920s, has resulted in strengthening the position of the SCOTUS relative to the other branches of government, especially in the process of constitutional adjudication, making the Court a serious and often final interpreter of what the law means.

  There are definitely numerous factors determining justices’ reasoning in constitutional cases, and the research results presented in this chapter are not exhaustive, especially in the context of the means of constitutional interpretation imposed by the Court in history. Still, it seems obvious that SCOTUS precedents play a significant role in constitutional law, both as the source of rulings which explain the scope of governmental powers and the rights of the people, and as the body of common law responsible for understanding the character and principles of the American legal system. In constitutional cases the justices usually focus on the Court’s own prior rulings, referring not only to the holding of the precedent, but also to the arguments raised by their predecessors. They often use national courts’ decisions as a basis on which to inform, explain, and justify the conclusion they reach, whereas references to international law and international jurisprudence are still an exception, proving the atmosphere of distrust between American judges and their counterparts from international tribunals. Although in history there were decisions in which the justices quoted foreign law as one of the references in building their arguments, rarely have foreign legislation or foreign court decisions become an important source of reference in SCOTUS reasoning. The Atkins, Roper, and, especially, Lawrence

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  Comparative Constitutional Reasoning

  • András Jakab, Arthur Dyevre, Giulio Itzcovich(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  In those systems, centralised constitutional courts, unlike their decentralised counterparts, often recruit their members from the ranks of legal academics; their decision-making pro- cess also often differs from ordinary adjudication (e.g. they are allowed to publish dissenting opinions); and specialisation in (or monopoly over) constitutional issues is also a contributing factor. The UK consti- tutional system is remarkable for the “continuity” between constitu- tional reasoning and ordinary statutory interpretation. Although there are many other countries where there is a strong continuity between these two enterprises due to the lack of a specialised constitutional court, in the UK, the lack of a codified constitution blurs the above distinction even further. 17. the supreme court of the united kingdom 719 2. Almost all constitutional courts are influenced to some extent by the jurisprudence of other courts. However, in some cases this influence is considerably stronger than in others. Constitutional courts in Europe in some sense all work under the supervision of the ECtHR, since the jurisprudence of this court, through various channels, has infil- trated virtually all European legal systems. Some constitutional courts, like the Czech one, decided to interpret their own domestic constitu- tions in the light of the jurisprudence of the ECtHR. In other cases, the constitution itself prescribed the method of Convention-friendly interpretation. 148 Still other countries, such as Finland, have explicitly modelled their own domestic bill of rights on the ECHR. However, in the UK the role of international harmonising arguments is even stronger because the HRA’s provisions on substantive rights are virtu- ally coextensive with those of the Convention, and the lack of a separate textual identity permits less room for the UK courts to manoeuvre.

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