Introduction

We are delighted to participate in this special festschrift in honour of Professor Upendra Baxi, whom we admire as a scholar and person of courage and principle. Having both explored, to varying degrees, the Indian Constitution, we appreciate the enormous contribution Baxi has made to the theory and practice of constitutional law, not only in India but also worldwide.

This volume focuses on the process, power, and problems of judicial review. The Indian judiciary is, of course, famous for its activist adjudication, or what Baxi refers to as ‘adjudicatory leadership’, which he believes is ‘a better notion than judicial activism’. Notable examples are the invention in the early 1970s of the ‘basic structure doctrine’ and the assertion of the power to conduct judicial review of constitutional amendments in order to safeguard the unamendable basic structure, or the democratization of access to justice through processes of social action litigation, which have promoted the disadvantaged and deprived classes—what Baxi termed ‘taking suffering seriously’. Baxi has eloquently described this activist story of the Indian judiciary and the court's role in social progress. This volume's focus on judicial power has led us to direct attention to another country—Israel—where the role of the Supreme Court in shaping the content of law and deciding political issues has greatly expanded in recent decades, a development largely attributable to the great activism exhibited by that court.