Book Reviews
| Published date | 01 June 2003 |
| Date | 01 June 2003 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.t01-1-00259 |
Book Reviews
THE POWER OF JUDGES by CARLO GUARNIERI AND PATRIZIA
PEDERZOLI (English ed., C.A. Thomas)
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 245 pp., £45.00)
This book is about what has been described as ‘the judicialisation of
politics’, an inelegant expression which bears more than one definition. That
deployed for the purposes of this work is ‘the expansion of the province of
courts or the judges at the expense of the politicians and or the
administrators’. The authors state at the outset: ‘The types of decisions that
contemporary democracies entrust to courts is consistently on the increase as
the public hand reaches deeper into the lives of individuals and develops new
areas of regulation, often under a growing demand for justice’. The authors
examine this phenomenon as it is manifested in seven jurisdictions: the
United States of America, England and Wales, Italy, Spain, France,
Germany, and Portugal. At the end of the introduction they express their
goal as being ‘to explain the wide variations in levels of judicialisation even
within the same legal family, and to consider the broader implications of
these developments for democracies.’ The book is written from a
sociological perspective. The authors are political scientists at the
Department of Organization and Political Systems at the Centre for Judicial
Studies within the Faculty of Political Sciences of the University of Bologna.
There are two features of the book which to my mind are particularly
striking. The first is the enormously high quality of the factual research that
has gone into the three central chapters (chapters 1–3). The second is that the
book’s arguments, as opposed to its deployment of facts, is disappointing.
But I will put aside this duo of praise and blame until I have given some
impression of the way the book is organized.
The three central chapters to which I have referred are entitled
respectively ‘Judges: Status, Career, and Activism’; ‘The Judicial System’;
‘The Political System’. The first of these gives the nuts and bolts of the
organization or structure of judicial careers (appointment, tenure, and so
forth) in each of the seven jurisdictions. The second explains the court
systems in the jurisdictions. It contains a section sub-titled ‘judicial review
of legislation’ which I found particularly interesting. The third of these
chapters addresses ‘the relationship between the judiciary and the broader
political system’. There follows a conclusion: ‘Judicial Power: Threat or Key
to Democracy?’. This is addressed to ‘the need for institutional reform of the
judiciary’. It refers to ‘specific problems’ or ‘important questions’ relating to
‘judicial legitimacy’. Here is how the book ends: ‘Ultimately, however, in
327
ßBlackwell Publishing Ltd 2003, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
To continue reading
Request your trial