ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to compare judicial review to other veto points commonly found in contemporary democratic systems, using the five criteria for democratic veto points developed in the previous chapter. We begin with a historic veto point—the liberum veto, which allowed individual legislators to invalidate the entirety of the work of a legislative session in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth—as an example of a veto point that fares particularly poorly on our criteria. We then turn to the Senate filibuster, bicameralism, and federalism. The former is a poor contender as a democratic veto point, for many of the same reasons the liberum veto fails. The latter two, like judicial review, have mixed results on our criteria, but the overall mix of democratic value and democratic danger for each of them appears to be worse than for judicial review, although specific circumstances could potentially change that valuation.
