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This book offers scholars and students of law, legal theory and history a new treatment of the 1975 Australian constitutional crisis. It traces the emergence of this fundamental constitutional debate in the turbulent Whitlam years and chronicles its subsequent iterations in institutional configurations.

Yoav Dotan examines the role of government lawyers in the rise of judicial activism in Israel and explores the question of judicial mobilization at large. Contains an original, large-scale, quantitative study of around 2,000 court files.

As the terminal crisis of the Weimar Republic intensified, Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt debated whether the Weimar Constitution should be protected by a constitutional court or by presidential dictatorship. This volume provides the first translation of Kelsen's and Schmitt's famous and influential exchange on the 'Guardian of the Constitution'.

This book examines how the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and the UK's Human Rights Act influence legislative decision-making and explores to what extent governmental and parliamentary behaviours have changed on key policy issues which present serious challenges for contemporary democracies in an age of rights.

For those interested in the relationship between politics, power and constitutions, this book examines the idea of prerogative power and reason of state by looking at the theoretical debates surrounding the development of the British constitution and the British Empire, singling out the East India Company as a focal point.

Jacob Weinrib's theory of public law elaborates on the idea of human dignity in order to illuminate and justify innovations in constitutional practice, including rights-based judicial review and proportionality. It will be of interest to legal, political and constitutional theorists, constitutional lawyers and judges, and scholars of comparative constitutional law.

This revisionary perspective on South Africa's celebrated Constitutional Court draws on historical and empirical sources alongside conventional legal analysis to show how support from the African National Congress (ANC) government and other political actors has underpinned the Court's landmark cases, which are often applauded too narrowly as merely judicial achievements. Standard accounts see the Court as overseer of a negotiated constitutional compromise and as the looked-to guardian of that constitution against the rising threat of the ANC. However, in reality South African successes have been built on broader and more admirable constitutional politics to a degree no previous account has described or acknowledged. The Court has responded to this context with a substantially consistent but widely misunderstood pattern of deference and intervention. Although a work in progress, this institutional self-understanding represents a powerful effort by an emerging court, as one constitutionally serious actor among others, to build a constitution.

Presenting a contrarian voice against a growing trend toward ever greater reliance on courts as democracy-builders, this book is aimed at a broad community of public lawyers, political scientists, and policymakers concerned with the role constitutional courts and regional human rights courts can play in developing democracy in post-authoritarian states.

This book provides a comprehensive review and analysis of the exercise of the reserve powers by heads of state in countries that have Westminster systems. It draws on a vast range of previously unpublished archival and primary material, including records from the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle.