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I INTRODUCTION In this lecture I would like to narrate the tale of how courts find it difficult to grapple with determining the degree they should venture to provide effective [...]

An investigation of the operation and limitations of constitutional courts in the Arab world gives a valuable insight into the development of judicial review in countries moving towards democracy. Judicial review is found very frequently in Arab countries, usually in the form of specialized constitutional courts. Judicial review is widely accepted in the Arab world, but only a few of the bodies responsible for judicial review are regarded as effective defenders of constitutionalism. There is growing democratic reliance on judicial review, but most of the constitutional documents of transitional countries show little awareness of the historic clash between constitutionalism and democracy.

In this Madison Lecture, chief Judge Posner advocates a pragmatic approach to constitutional decisionmaking, criticizing constitutional theorists who conceal their normative goals in vague and unworkable principles of interpretation. After discussing specific constitutional theories as well as the legal academy's increasing reliance on theory in general, Posner demonstrates the ineffectuality of constitutional theory, using the Supreme Court's decisions in United States v. Virginia and Romer v. Evans as examples. He argues not that these cases were necessarily wrongly decided, but that the opinions lack the empirical support that is crucial to sound constitutional adjudication. Posner urges law professors to focus their scholarship on forms of inquiry that will actually prove useful to judges and concludes by asking that judges themselves recognize and acknowledge the limitations of their empirical knowledge.

Courts in both the United States and Canada have been forced to consider the constitutionality of laws disenfranchising convicted offenders. Despite similar legal traditions, courts in the two countries have reached diametrically opposed results, with the U.S. Supreme Court upholding broad state power to disenfranchise offenders and Canadian courts rejecting progressively less severe restrictions on offenders' right to vote. Using these decisions as its focus, this article analyzes contemporary theories of judicial review and argues that neither interpretive nor noninterpretive theories of review capture the complex relationship between legal positivism and moral principle that is at the core of liberal constitutionalism. Consequently, neither the Canadian nor American decisions have fully grappled with the normative principles underlying criminal disenfranchisement. The paper further argues that there is a principled defense of criminal disenfranchisement that is grounded in the relationship among citizenship, civic virtue, and punishment., On 27 May 1993 the Supreme Court of Canada delivered its unanimous judgment in the companion cases of Attorney General of Canada v. Sauve and The Queen v. Belczowski.(1) At [...]

The Supreme Court's decisions on cases, such as Brown v. Board of Education and Griswold v. Connecticut, proves that judicial review is not required for protection of liberal political opinions. The courts seemed to favor more the opinions of the dominant national political coalitions. However, there had been deviations, which have either resulted in favorable or detrimental outcomes. What judicial review provides are merely changes, both good and bad, on the output of the political system.