Luís Pereira Coutinho – författare

Constitutional courts claim to act “in the name of the people” and, moreover, are supposed to do so in the express terms of many constitutional texts. This raises the question of knowing whether they can be deemed as proper representatives of the people. This book addresses that question, offering different views both in favor and against the idea of political representation by the constitutional jurisdiction. The contributions are authored by prominent scholars with outstanding previous work on the themes of political representation and of constitutional review, namely Michel Troper, Pasquale Pasquino, Pierre Brunet, Miguel Nogueira de Brito, Dimitrios Kyritsis, Bojan Spaic, Pedro Lomba, and Pierre-Marie Raynal. Chapter “In search of what is common: political representation by the constitutional jurisdiction” is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0International License via link.springer.com.

This volume offers different perspectives on judicial practice in the European and American contexts, both arguably characterized in the last decades by the emergence of novel normative and even policy arguments by judges. The central question deserving the attention of the contributors concerns the degree in which judicial exercises in practical reasoning may amount to forms of judicial usurpation of the legislative function by courts. Since different views as to the nature and scope of legal reasoning lead to different degrees of tolerance regarding what should be admissible to courts, that same nature and scope is thoroughly debated.

The main disciplinary approach is that of general jurisprudence, but the contributions take stock of other disciplines in which judicial activism has been addressed, namely positive theories of judicial behavior. Accordingly, the book also explores the development of interdisciplinary dialogue about the theme.