We, the people of India, have adopted a written Constitution which has created an independent judiciary having the power of judicial review. While exercising this power, the judiciary not only acts as a guardian of the Constitution and its values, but also protects us from illegality, arbitrariness, malafides and corruption of other organs of the State. Therefore, in order to perform these functions the judiciary in India, since the adoption of the Constitution has been enjoying the highest degree of independence and has been held least accountable. This system has been adopted in the Constitution with the objective to achieve the concept of Justice as enshrined in the Preamble. It is pertinent to note that initially the judiciary had responded appropriately to achieve this object but, in due course of time, the Indian Judiciary under the guise of judicial activism, has shifted its focus in addition to delivering Justice, to governing the nation and its policies.

Since 2007, the Supreme Court of Pakistan has emerged as a dominant force in Pakistani politics through its hyper-active use of judicial review, or the power to overrule Parliament’s laws and the Prime Minister’s acts. This hyper-activism was on display during the Supreme Court’s unilateral disqualification of Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani in 2012 under the leadership of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry. Despite the Supreme Court’s practical adoption of restraint subsequent to the retirement of Chief Justice Chaudhry in 2013, the Court has once again disqualified a prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, due to allegations of corruption in 2017. While many critics have focused on the substance of the Court’s decisions in these cases, sufficient focus is not paid to the amorphous case-selection process of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. In order to compare the relatively unregulated process of case-selection in Pakistan to the more structured processes utilized by the Supreme Courts of the United States’ and India, this book aims to understand the historical roots of judicial review in each country dating back to the colonial era extending through the foundational period of each nation impacting present-day jurisprudence. As a first in its kind, this study comparatively examines these periods of history in order to contextualize a practical prescription to standardize the case-selection process in the Supreme Court of Pakistan in a way that retains the Court’s overall power while limiting its involvement in purely political issues. This publication offers a critical and comparative view of the Supreme Court of Pakistan’s recent involvement in political disputes due to the lack of a discerning case-selection system that has otherwise been adopted by the Supreme Courts of India and the United States’ to varying degrees. It will be of interest to academics in the fields of Asian Law, South Asian Politics and Law and Comparative Law.

This book investigates the mechanisms of judicial control to determine an efficient methodology for independence and accountability. Using over 800 case studies from the Czech and Slovak disciplinary courts, the author creates a theoretical framework that can be applied to future case studies and decrease the frequency of accountability perversions.

CONTENTS: I. The Needless Mystery of Court House Government. II. Fights and Rights. III. Facts Are Guesses. IV. Modern Legal Magic. V. Wizards and Lawyers. VI. The "Fight" Theory versus the "Truth" Theory. VII. The Procedural Reformers. VIII. The Jury System. IX. Defenses of the Jury System--Suggested Reforms. X. Are Judges Human? XI. Psychological Approaches. XII. Criticism of Trial-Court Decisions--The Gestalt. XIII. A Trial as a Communicative Process. XIV. "Legal Science" and "Legal Engineering." XV. The Upper-Court Myth. XVI. Legal Education. XVII. Special Training for Trial Judges. XVIII. The Cult of the Robe. XIX. Precedents and Stability. XX. Codification. XXI. Words and Music: Legislation and Judicial Interpretation. XXII. Constitutions--The Merry-Go-Round. XIII. Legal Reasoning. XXIV. Da Capo. XXV. The Anthropological Approach. XXVI. Natural Law. XXVII. The Psychology of Litigants. XXVIII. The Unblindfolding of Justice. XXIX. Classicism and Romanticism. XXX. Justice and Emotions. XXXI. Questioning Some Legal Axioms. XXXII. Reason and Unreason--Ideals.

This book provides a supportive lending hand to researchers of constitutional law worldwide about the constitutional law of Bangladesh. Moreover, this book discusses the evolution and development of the constitutional law of Bangladesh over 50 years from its embryonic stage with reference to comparative constitutional law. This book is a very useful resource for the comparative constitutional researchers as readers will be able to easily interpret the constitutional law of Bangladesh from national, regional and global constitutional law perspectives. This book celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the Constitution, the first of its kind to portray the journey of constitutionalism in Bangladesh comprehensively with intellectual observations and palatable recommendations for improvement. This book looks back to the constituent assembly debates, intention of the constitution makers and how have those dreams and aspirations have come into realities, what goals have been achieved, what caused some failures, and what should be its future directions. At such a momentous point in history, it is imperative that its native and foreign constitutional authoritative voices scholarly assess the constitutional design, understand the reasons for its successes and occasional failures, and ventilate their views towards its progressive development to elevate it to a new height in the 21st century and beyond. The book chapters discuss not only the text of the constitution and some judicial precedents, rather involve in a much larger task of unveiling the interpretative approach of the Constitution from a comparative constitutional law perspective. This book shall project the future roadmap for the journey of constitutionalism in Bangladesh throughout all chapters offering policy recommendations for the revision of the Constitution.

This study discusses the many different aspects of judicial independence in Israel. It begins with an historical analysis of the concept of judicial independence in a comparative perspective, emphasizing the conceptual roots of the judiciary in Jewish law. Recent decades have witnessed a marked increase in the role played by the judiciary in society. This general trend is apparent in Israel, where the highly significant social role played by the judiciary has been on the increase for some years. The constitutional role of the judiciary in society is more pronounced in countries where the courts are empowered to review the constitutionality of legislative acts. In Israel the power of judicial review, in decisions of the Supreme Court, has been applied in a number of cases in which legislation of the Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, has been set aside. The increasingly prominent role of the judiciary in Israel is further manifested by the frequent recourse to judicial commissions of inquiry, chaired by judges who are often called upon to examine some of the major public controversies.

Traditional separation of powers theories assumed that governmental despotism will be prevented by dividing the branches of government which will check one another. Modern governments function with unexpected complicity among these branches. Sometimes one of the branches becomes overwhelming. Other governmental structures, however, tend to mitigate these tendencies to domination. Among other structures courts have achieved considerable autonomy vis-à-vis the traditional political branches of power. They tend to maintain considerable distance from political parties in the name of professionalism and expertise. The conditions and criteria of independence are not clear, and even less clear are the conditions of institutional integrity. Independence (including depolitization) of public institutions is of particular practical relevance in the post-Communist countries where political partisanship penetrated institutions under the single party system. Institutional integrity, particularly in the context of administration of justice, became a precondition for accession to the European Union. Given this practical challenge the present volume is centered around three key areas of institutional integrity, primarily within the administration of justice: First, in a broader theoretical-interdisciplinary context the criteria of institutional independence are discussed. The second major issue is the relation of neutralized institutions to branches of government with reference to accountability. Thirdly, comparative experience regarding judicial independence is discussed to determine techniques to enhance integrity.