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The Case for the New Commonwealth Model of Constitutionalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Abstract

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The article presents the normative case for the new Commonwealth model as a novel third way of organizing basic institutional arrangements in a democracy and an alternative to the conventional dichotomy of legal or political constitutionalism. In so doing, it engages with the latest contributions to the debate about the merits of judicial review, and argues that the new model radically and compellingly permits a form of “proportional representation” among the best arguments for and against the practice rather than the “warts-and-all” of the traditional either/or approach. In this way, the new model is to forms of constitutionalism what the mixed economy is to forms of economic organization: a distinct and appealing third way in between two purer but flawed extremes. Just as the mixed economy is a hybrid economic form combining the core benefits of capitalism and socialism while minimizing their well-known costs, so too the new model offers an alternative to the old choice of judicial supremacy or traditional parliamentary sovereignty by combining the strengths of each while avoiding their major weaknesses. Like the mixed economy's countering of the lopsided allocation of power under capitalism to markets and under socialism to planning, the new model counters legal and political constitutionalism's lopsided allocations of power to courts and legislatures respectively.

Type
Part II: The Relationship Between the Courts and Political Institutions
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by German Law Journal GbR

Footnotes

*

MacArthur Foundation Professor of International Justice & Human Rights, UCLA School of Law, gardbaum@law.ucla.edu. This article is an adapted and abridged version of chapter 3 of my recently published book The New Commonwealth Model of Constitutionalism: Theory and Practice (2013), and was originally presented to the workshop on political constitutionalism held at Glasgow-Caledonian University on 7 June 2012. Copyright © 2013 Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with permission.

References

1 Unless otherwise stated, I shall be using the terms constitutional review and judicial review (in the American sense) synonymously throughout this article.Google Scholar

2 For a much fuller account of what is new about the new model, see Stephen Gardbaum, The New Commonwealth Model 2 (2013).Google Scholar

3 See Adam Tomkins, Our Republican Constitution (2005); see also Richard Bellamy, Political Constitutionalism: A Republican Defence of the Constitutionality of Democracy (2007); Aileen Kavanagh, Constitutional Review under the UK Human Rights Act 338–403 (2009).Google Scholar

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5 Kumm, Socratic Contestation, supra note 4, at 1.Google Scholar

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13 Although I am primarily discussing the new model within the framework of the domestic democratic polity, it could also be applied to entities beyond the state.Google Scholar

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24 Kumm gives this example, based on the 1981 ECHR case of Dudgeon v. United Kingdom. See Kumm, Socratic Contestation, supra note 4, at 22–24 (citing Dudgeon v. United Kingdom, ECHR App. No. 7525/76 (Feb. 24, 1983), http://hudoc.echr.coe.int/).Google Scholar

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26 Korematsu v. United States, 323 U.S. 214 (1944).Google Scholar

27 The classic statement of this argument was made by James Bradley Thayer. See James Bradley Thayer, John Marshall (1901). Thayer considered that the tendency of legislatures within a system of judicial supremacy to leave consideration of constitutional limits to the courts and to assume that whatever they can constitutionally do they may do, meant that “honor and fair dealing and common honesty were not relevant to their inquiries.” Even more famously, he argued that as judicial review involved the correction of legislative mistakes from the outside, it results in the people losing the “political experience, and the moral education and stimulus that come from … correcting their own errors. [The] tendency of a common and easy resort to this great function [is] to dwarf the political capacity of the people, and to deaden its sense of moral responsibility.” Id. at 103–107.Google Scholar

28 Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905).Google Scholar

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35 This argument originates with Alexander Hamilton in Federalist Paper 78. The Federalist No. 78 (Alexander Hamilton).Google Scholar

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38 A different form of “proportional representation,” one that allocates greater weight to legal constitutionalism, would be to employ the new model for social rights but to retain strong-form judicial review for civil and political rights. See Mark Tushnet, The Relation Between Political Constitutionalism and Weak-Form Judicial Review, 14 German L.J. 2237 (2013).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 Jeffrey Goldsworthy, Parliamentary Sovereignty: Contemporary Debates 302–303 (2010).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 Fallon, supra note 4, at 1707.Google Scholar

41 The current delaying power of the House of Lords is one year under the 1949 Parliament Act. See Parliament Act 1949, 1949, 12, 13 & 14 Geo. 6, c. 103 (U.K.).Google Scholar

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