Book Review: The Politico-Legal Dynamics of Judicial Review
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663919859775 |
| Date | 01 October 2019 |
| Author | Margit Cohn |
| Published date | 01 October 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
References
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sanctions for unemployment benefit claimants. In: ESPAnet Conference, Poznan. Available at:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id¼2328253 (accessed 24 July 2018).
THEUNIS ROUX, The Politico-Legal Dynamics of Judicial Review. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2018, pp. 372, ISBN 978-1-108-42542-1, £85.00 (hbk).
In this important contribution to the understanding of the nature and dynamics of judicial
review, Theunis Roux untangles this aspect of the reach of law into the public sphere
through courts, by originally combining several less-addressed angles and approaches.
The rich theoretical basis, applied in a comparative framework, offers readers from law,
politics, culture, history – and anyone interested in the dynamics of modern life – a fresh
and important perspective on a well-discussed question.
In essence, Roux advances two arguments. First, judicial review, a feature of most
legal systems, should be understood as the outcome of a complex ideational interaction
between law and politics. Thus defined, the politico-legal phenomenon of judicial review
is first and foremost the product of ideologies and social perceptions that shape justifi-
catory claims to the role authority of law, on the one hand, and of politics, on the other.
Two templates, the first relying on pure politics, the second on moral philosophy, are
rejected in favour of the examination of societal beliefs over both law and politics as
determinants of the legitimacy of judicial review. Roux’s second emphasis brings the
temporal dimension to the fore. Drawing on sociology and history, he rejects single-
snapshot study, typical to much of the scholarship, and draws attention to ‘the slower-
moving, macro-social process through which conceptions of the law/politics relation
evolve and change character over time’.
1
Both arguments are conceptually developed
through the introduction of several analytical taxonomies, tested and confirmed in two
sets of comparative endeavours.
Chapter 1 addresses several pre liminary angles . The literature su rvey offered here
is limited to studies that have some affinity to Roux’s linking of law with politics.
Showing some of the weaknesses of this literature, Roux moves to an analysis of two
bodies of research that are considered directly relevant to the book: historical
institutionalism and comparative historical analysis. Those research paths, developed
in the social sciences, largely inform the development of Roux’s emphasis on the
long-term, multi-stage processes that shape the institution of judicial review in a large
number of studied systems.
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