Rethinking Legitimacy: Courts, Constitutions and Politics

This book presents a new perspective on the debate around legitimacy, politics and constitutional law in Supreme Courts.

Moving away from the troubling perception that Supreme Courts are trampling on the wrong side of the law/politics divide, it accepts and defends the critical claim that constitutional law is intrinsically and inescapably politics: in style, substance and outcome.

It explains what is involved in that claim and recommends a more nuanced and compelling account than it is caricatured to be. The book proceeds to demonstrate how the legal and judicial process can proceed if the law-is-politics critique is taken seriously. Insisting that it cannot be business as usual, the author offers a series of constructive proposals about how constitutional law and judicial decision-making can continue in anything like their present format and style.

Recognising that a more radical approach could be taken to the way in which democracy might re-organise, the book runs with the idea that it is possible to incorporate and accommodate the law-is-politics argument within a governmental system of constitutional democracy that resembles closely what now occurs. In that sense, the book is both critical and constructive as well as principled and pragmatic.