Because judicial review in the United States has been a model for other countries, it is appropriate to devote some discussion to it and to the body of constitutional law it has produced. Despite its overwhelming importance, judicial review is not explicitly mentioned in the U.S. Constitution; indeed, it is itself a product of judicial construction. In Marbury v. Madison (1803), the Supreme Court ruled that, because the Constitution clearly states that it is the supreme law of the land and because it is the province of the judiciary to uphold the law, the courts must declare state laws and even acts of Congress null and void when they are inconsistent with a provision of the Constitution. The same principle holds with regard to executive actions contrary to the Constitution. Supreme Court pronouncements on questions of constitutionality are final and binding for all other courts and governmental authorities, whether state or federal.

In the U.S. system of judicial review, constitutional questions can be raised only in connection with actual “cases and controversies.” Advisory opinions to the government are common in other countries but are not rendered by U.S. federal courts. Although the cases and controversies requirement has been relaxed by the Supreme Court—at least to the extent of allowing class-action suits or allowing organizations to sue on behalf of their members who have not personally brought suit—it is still the case that courts will not decide a constitutional question unless it is rooted in a controversy in which the parties have a direct, personal interest. This requirement can sometimes frustrate efforts to obtain pronouncements on disputed issues.

Although the U.S. courts are the guardians of the Constitution, they are not bound to consider all the provisions of the Constitution justiciable. Under the doctrine of “political questions,” the Supreme Court has refused at times to apply standards prescribed by or deducible from the Constitution to issues that it believed could be better decided by the political branches of government. Since Luther v. Borden (1849), for example, it is a matter of settled practice that the court will not use Article IV, Section 4—which provides that the states must have a republican form of government—to invalidate state laws; it is for Congress and the president to decide whether a particular state government is republican in form. Many military and foreign policy questions, such as the constitutionality of a particular war, likewise have been considered political and therefore nonjusticiable.

On the other hand, the political-question doctrine has not prevented the Supreme Court from asserting its jurisdiction in cases that are politically sensitive. Thus, in United States v. Nixon (1974), the court ruled that President Richard Nixon was required to turn over to federal authorities the tape recordings that confirmed his complicity in the Watergate scandal. The doctrine also did not prevent the court from intervening in the presidential election of 2000, when it halted the recount of ballots in the disputed state of Florida and effectively confirmed George W. Bush’s victory, despite forceful arguments that, under the Constitution and relevant federal statutes, the matter was clearly one for Florida and Congress to decide.

Judicial review is designed to be more impartial than review by other institutions of government. This does not mean, however, that it is immune to policy considerations or to changes in the needs and political attitudes of the people. As a matter of fact, the Supreme Court’s reading of the Constitution has itself evolved in the course of more than two centuries, in accordance with the large transformations that have occurred in American society.

Given the structure of the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme Court historically has resolved constitutional disputes in four main areas: the relations between the states and the national government, the separation of powers within the national government, the right of government to regulate the economy, and individual rights and freedoms. In each of these areas the court’s conception of the Constitution has undergone substantial changes.

From 1789 through the Civil War era, the Supreme Court was a crucial participant in nation building, its decisions reinforcing the newly born structures of the federal system. The court’s rulings established judicial supremacy in constitutional interpretation, gave force to the national supremacy clause of Article VI of the Constitution—which declared the Constitution the supreme law of the United States—and laid the foundation for the power of the federal government to intervene in the national economy by broadly interpreting its constitutional power to regulate interstate commerce. In contrast, during the decades of industrialization and economic growth that followed the Civil War, the court was very skeptical of attempts at economic regulation by the federal government. Indeed, until the Great Depression spawned the New Deal legislation of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the court often ruled that many areas of economic activity were matters exclusively for state legislation or not subject to government regulation at all. After 1937, however, the court lifted the obstacles it had previously erected to federal intervention in the economic and social transactions of the country. Within a few years the Supreme Court established that Congress can make laws with respect to practically all commercial matters of national concern.

A foundation of this expansion of the government’s power to intervene in the economy and society was laid in the doctrine of federal spending power first enunciated in United States v. Butler (1936). The outcome of this case was overtly hostile to the expansion of government power, since the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a tax provision of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 that was designed to encourage limitation of production. However, the lasting contribution of the decision emerged from the Supreme Court’s conclusion that the Constitution gives Congress a general and broad power to tax and spend in support of the general welfare. As a further example, the new interpretation of the commerce clause laid down in Wickard v. Filburn (1942) upheld the federal government’s right to enforce quotas on the production of agricultural products in virtually all circumstances, even when, as in this case, a farmer exceeding his quota—by an admittedly sizable amount of wheat—proclaimed his intention to consume all his excess production, thereby preventing it from entering interstate commerce at all.

In the area of separation of federal powers, the court gradually came to support a substantial transfer of powers to the executive and to administrative agencies. Because Article I, Section 1 of the Constitution confers all legislative powers upon Congress, the court at first ruled that such powers cannot be delegated by Congress to the executive. This doctrine was much diluted in the 20th century, when it became clear that delegated legislation was necessary to administer a mixed economy. The court’s generally favourable attitude toward enhancing the powers of the executive branch has manifested itself in other areas as well, notably in the field of foreign affairs. Nevertheless, the court has set important limits on the powers of the president. It has ruled, for example, that the president does not have an “inherent” power to seize steel mills in time of war (Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 1952) and that the prerogative of the president to keep confidential records secret must yield to the need of the judiciary to enforce criminal justice if the secret is not strictly related to military or diplomatic matters (United States v. Nixon, 1974).

Until the New Deal, the court used the provisions of the Constitution concerning individual rights and freedoms primarily to protect property and economic liberties against state and federal efforts to interfere with the market. Thus, it often used the due process clause of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments (no person shall be deprived of “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”) to invalidate social legislation, such as laws establishing minimum or maximum working hours. In contrast, the court’s agenda is now dominated by litigation directly raising questions involving civil and political rights and freedoms, as well as individual equality before the law. Due process claims focus primarily on procedural rights in criminal and administrative areas. In the mid-20th century, during a period of expansion of individual rights, the court declared unconstitutional racial segregation in the schools (Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 1954) and malapportionment in electoral districts (Baker v. Carr, 1962; Wesberry v. Sanders, 1964) and strengthened the rights of criminal defendants and the accused (Mapp v. Ohio, 1961; Miranda v. Arizona, 1966). The court also recognized a constitutional right to privacy (Griswold v. State of Connecticut, 1965), which became the foundation for the right of a woman to obtain an abortion (Roe v. Wade, 1973; Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, 1992). Beginning in the 1970s, the court was less willing to support litigant claims that would further expand individual rights and freedoms, though for the most part it did not significantly restrict them.

Through more than two centuries of judicial review, the U.S. Supreme Court typically has supported the values of the prevailing political ideology against challenges from the states or other branches of the federal government. Indeed, it has often been said that the court conducts judicial review by following election returns and public opinion polls. Although there is considerable insight in this observation, it is not true that the court simply tailors its decisions to comport with the political views of the electoral majority. At times, as in the early 20th century, the court’s view of economic legislation was out of step with the views of the electorate, the other federal branches, and some states. In the 1950s and early ’60s the court also made decisions contrary to public opinion and government policy regarding political and racial equality and other civil, political, and procedural rights.

Judicial review outside the United States

In the world outside the United States, the idea of making the judiciary the guardian of the constitution was not warmly received until the second half of the 20th century. Political and legal traditions in Europe and elsewhere emphasized central executive or parliamentary sovereignty and forbade the judiciary from filling interstices in the laws. Eventually, however, the failure of popular governments based on parliamentary sovereignty, the experience of world war, wholesale decolonization, and the need to reconstruct the collapsed regimes built upon fascism and communism led to a sharp change in worldwide attitudes toward constitutional judicial review. By the early 21st century constitutional review by the judiciary of legislative and executive actions was a formal part of the written constitutions of a majority of the world’s nations, including the postcommunist regimes of eastern Europe and postapartheid South Africa. In other countries where judicial review is central to the workings of government—including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—its foundations lay in national-autonomy statutes or judicial pronouncements rather than in written constitutions.

Judicial review in Europe differs from the U.S. model. Instead of allowing any court to rule on the constitutionality of statutes, with the high court in the regular judicial hierarchy being the ultimate arbiter, European countries have established special constitutional courts to which all questions concerning the constitutional validity of legislation or executive action must be referred—and which alone have the power to declare statutes or actions unconstitutional.

In 1920 Austria became the first European country to inaugurate centralized judicial review in a constitutional court. After World War II, Italy, West Germany, France, and Turkey also established constitutional courts, as did Spain and Portugal after the fall of the dictatorships in those countries in the 1970s. Virtually every post-Soviet eastern European country followed suit, as did Luxembourg in 1997. In contrast, the countries of Scandinavia, as well as Belgium, Greece, and Ireland, vest judicial-review powers of varying kinds in their regular courts. The United Kingdom and the Netherlands remain the principal European countries lacking constitutional judicial review. In both countries, however, the courts may hold that laws are void because they are inconsistent with the provisions of binding international treaties, such as those establishing the law of the European Union.

Where constitutional courts exist, questions concerning the validity of statutory laws or executive actions reach the court chiefly through referrals from the judges of ordinary courts, who certify the presence of a constitutional question in the litigation, or through appeals by the losing parties, who assert that the decisions of ordinary courts have deprived them of their constitutional rights. In some circumstances nonjudicial agencies—such as the national executive, the regional governments, or a parliamentary minority—can bring issues directly to the constitutional court. Most European constitutional courts also differ from the U.S. Supreme Court in that they can hear both “concrete” and “abstract” disputes—suits that, respectively, do and do not involve an actual case or controversy. In France the Constitutional Council can set aside unconstitutional statutes only before they have been promulgated and only upon petition by either the president of the republic, the prime minister, the chairman of either of the two legislative assemblies, or a parliamentary minority that includes at least 60 deputies or senators.

The U.S. system of judicial review by ordinary courts also has been adopted widely. It has been in operation in Switzerland, with some limitations, since 1874. It is also practiced in several major former British colonies, including India, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and in Japan and the Philippines, countries whose constitutions were drafted with considerable U.S. influence.

Judicial review by the highest regular courts has been the dominant arrangement in Latin America, though often the influence of a powerful president or the existence of a politicized appointment process has made constitutional review effectively a cipher. Nonetheless, courts in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and other Latin American countries have become increasingly active in restraining the executive and legislative bodies, and there is a trend toward greater use of judicial review in the region.

Although the practice is not always enshrined in written constitutions, constitutional judicial review is also the rule in a majority of African, Middle Eastern, and Asian countries, with the regular-court variety being most common in former British territories and the constitutional-court type in former French dependencies. There is also a small group of countries that lodge the power of constitutional review specifically in an agency other than a regular or a constitutional court.

For the most part, the American doctrine of political questions has not been accepted in the jurisprudence of centralized European systems. Besides adjudging the validity of statutory law, European constitutional courts usually must also resolve conflicts between state agencies (the legislature, the executive, the president of the republic, and the judiciary) concerning their respective constitutional prerogatives; in addition, they may conduct trials of impeachment and dispose of other matters of constitutional import.