Question

Why is the United States’ system of government so dependent on the concept and practice of judicial review?

Answer 1

Judicial examination, the power of a country's courts to investigate the acts of the government's legislative, executive, and administrative arms to decide if such activities are compliant with the constitution. Actions found incompatible are ruled unconstitutional and, therefore, null and void. Through this context, the process of judicial review relies on there being a written constitution.

The traditional usage of the word judicial review may be defined more accurately as "constitutional review," because there is also a long history of judicial review of administrative agency acts that require that the courts have no authority to find such acts unconstitutional or that the country has a written constitution. This "administrative review" assesses the administrators ' potentially dubious behavior against principles of reasonableness and arbitrary misconduct.

When courts find challenged administrative acts to be unconstitutional or involve misuse of authority, such acts are ruled null and void, as are actions found to be incompatible with constitutional standards when courts exercise judicial review in the traditional or constitutional context. If a court has the authority to find the actions of government entities illegal or not, the same result can be accomplished by the exercise of "indirect" judicial review. In these cases the court decides that the legislature may not have intended a challenged rule or practice because it is incompatible with any other laws or existing legal principles.

In countries that follow U.S. custom (e.g., Kenya and New Zealand), judicial review can only be exercised in particular cases or disputes and only after the fact i.e., it can be found that only laws that are in place or acts that have already occurred are unconstitutional, and only then when they include a particular conflict between litigants. In France, judicial review must be undertaken in the abstract (i.e., in the absence of a specific case or controversy) and before promulgation (i.e., before a challenged law takes effect). For other nations judicial review only takes place after a statute has come into practice, but they can do so either in the abstract or in particular cases.

Because of the impact of U.S. constitutional ideas— particularly the concept that a system of constitutional checks and balances is an integral aspect of democratic government — many countries felt great pressure to implement judicial review after World War II. Some scholars argued that the concentration of government power in the executive, essentially unregulated by other government departments, led to the rise of authoritarian regimes in Germany and Japan in the era between the First World War and the Second World War. While judicial review was relatively uncommon before the Second World War, by the early 21st century, more than 100 countries had been directly targeted