The Success of Judicial Review

Abstract

Comparative law as practiced by academic lawyers is typically a sterile taxonomy saved by a pragmatic experimentalism. The legal doctrines of two countries are exposed through a careful sifting of statutes, judicial opinions and scholarly commentary. Similarities and differences are noted. For most areas of law in most countries, or at least most post-tribal or post-feudal countries, similarities overwhelm differences. Noticing the dominance of similarity, some authors may then seek the grail of universal legal principles derived from a universal moral or natural or categorical law, or international human rights, or the holy progress of the law, to meet universal human needs. To the less sanguine, the dominant similarities point only to the human concerns for security of person, mine and thine, and family that are indeed universal but are not necessarily moral, progressive or unifying. Others, more struck by the legal differences they observe, turn to adumbrating a global law divided into a number of families: common, civil, Islamic, Socialist, Confucian.