ABSTRACT

The Success of Judicial Review: The United States’ Experience In the realm of constitutional judicial review, the question addressed here is success. How and when have constitutional courts succeeded? Success will be defined narrowly and positivistically in terms of when an exercise of constitutional judicial review has changed public policy in the direction the court wants public policy to go. Obviously implicit in this definition of success is the precondition that the court manages to establish and retain its power to exercise judicial review. What it does not contain is any substantive component such as changing public policy in a direction more favorable to ‘human rights’ or ‘social justice’.