American society has undergone a revolution within a revolution. Until the 1960s, America was a liberal country in the traditional sense of legislative and executive checks and balances. Since then, the Supreme Court has taken on the role of the protector of individual rights against the will of the majority by creating, in a series of decisions, new rights for criminal defendants, atheists, homosexuals, illegal aliens, and others. Repeatedly, on a variety of cases, the Court has overturned the actions of local police or state laws under which local officials are acting. The result, according to Quirk and Birdwell, is freedom for the lawless and oppression for the law abiding. 'Judicial Dictatorship' challenges the status quo, arguing that in many respects the Supreme Court has assumed authority far beyond the original intent of the Founding Fathers. In order to avoid abuse of power, the three branches of the American government were designed to operate under a system of checks and balances. However, this balance has been upset. The Supreme Court has become the ultimate arbiter in the legal system through exercise of the doctrine of judicial review, which allows the court to invalidate any state or federal law it considers inconsistent with the constitution. Supporters of judicial review believe that there has to be a final arbiter of constitutional interpretation, and the Judiciary is the most suitable choice. Opponents, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln among them, believed that judicial review assumes the judicial branch is above the other branches, a result the Constitution did not intend. The democratic paradox is that the majority in America agreed to limit its own power. Jefferson believed that the will of the majority must always prevail. His faith in the common man led him to advocate a weak national government, one that derived its power from the people. Alexander Hamilton, often Jefferson's adversary, lacking such faith, feared "the amazing violence and turbulence of the democratic spirit." This led him to believe in a strong national government, a social and economic aristocracy, and finally, judicial review. This conflict has yet to be resolved. 'Judicial Dictatorship' discusses the issue of who will decide if government has gone beyond its proper powers. That issue, in turn, depends on whether the Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian view of the nature of the person prevails. In challenging customary ideological alignments of conservative and liberal doctrine, 'Judicial Dictatorship' will be of interest to students and professionals in law, political scientists, and those interested in U.S. history.

This book argues that explaining judicial independence-considered the fundamental question of comparative law and politics-requires a perspective that spans the democracy/autocracy divide. Rather than seeking separate explanations in each regime context, in The Political Foundations of Judicial Independence in Dictatorship and Democracy, Brad Epperly argues that political competition is a salient factor in determining levels of de facto judicial independence across regime type, and in autocracies a factor of far greater import. This is because a full " account of independence requires looking not only at the likelihood those in power might lose elections but also the variable risks associated with such an outcome, risks that are far higher for autocrats. First demonstrating that courts can and do provide insurance to former leaders, he then shows via exhaustive cross-national analyses that competition's effects are far higher in autocratic regimes, providing the first evidence for the causal nature of the relationship. Epperly argues that these findings differ from existing case study research because in democratic regimes, a lack of political competition means incumbents target the de jure independence of courts. This argument is illustrated via in-depth case study of the Hungarian Constitutional Court after the country's 2010 " and then tested globally. Blending formal theory, observational and instrumental variables models, and elite interviews of leading Hungarian legal scholars and judges, Epperly offers a new framework for understanding judicial independence that integrates explanations of both de jure and de facto independence in both democratic and autocratic regimes.

Reveals how the U.S. Supreme Court's presidentialism threatens our democracy and what to do about it. Donald Trump's presidency made many Americans wonder whether our system of checks and balances would prove robust enough to withstand an onslaught from a despotic chief executive. In The Specter of Dictatorship, David Driesen analyzes the chief executive's role in the democratic decline of Hungary, Poland, and Turkey and argues that an insufficiently constrained presidency is one of the most important systemic threats to democracy. Driesen urges the U.S. to learn from the mistakes of these failing democracies. Their experiences suggest, Driesen shows, that the Court must eschew its reliance on and expansion of the "unitary executive theory" recently endorsed by the Court and apply a less deferential approach to presidential authority, invoked to protect national security and combat emergencies, than it has in recent years. Ultimately, Driesen argues that concern about loss of democracy should play a major role in the Court's jurisprudence, because loss of democracy can prove irreversible. As autocracy spreads throughout the world, maintaining our democracy has become an urgent matter.

American society has undergone a revolution within a revolution. Until the 1960s, America was a liberal country in the traditional sense of legislative and executive checks and balances. Since then, the Supreme Court has taken on the role of the protector of individual rights against the will of the majority by creating, in a series of decisions, new rights for criminal defendants, atheists, homosexuals, illegal aliens, and others. Repeatedly, on a variety of cases, the Court has overturned the actions of local police or state laws under which local officials are acting. The result, according to Quirk and Birdwell, is freedom for the lawless and oppression for the law abiding. Judicial Dictatorship challenges the status quo, arguing that in many respects the Supreme Court has assumed authority far beyond the original intent of the Founding Fathers. In order to avoid abuse of power, the three branches of the American government were designed to operate under a system of checks and balances. However, this balance has been upset. The Supreme Court has become the ultimate arbiter in the legal system through exercise of the doctrine of judicial review, which allows the court to invalidate any state or federal law it considers inconsistent with the constitution. Supporters of judicial review believe that there has to be a final arbiter of constitutional interpretation, and the Judiciary is the most suitable choice. Opponents, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln among them, believed that judicial review assumes the judicial branch is above the other branches, a result the Constitution did not intend. The democratic paradox is that the majority in America agreed to limit its own power. Jefferson believed that the will of the majority must always prevail. His faith in the common man led him to advocate a weak national government, one that derived its power from the people. Alexander Hamilton, often Jefferson's adversary, lacking such faith, feared "the amazing violence and turbulence of the democratic spirit." This led him to believe in a strong national government, a social and economic aristocracy, and finally, judicial review. This conflict has yet to be resolved. Judicial Dictatorship discusses the issue of who will decide if government has gone beyond its proper powers. That issue, in turn, depends on whether the Jeffersonian or Hamiltonian view of the nature of the person prevails. In challenging customary ideological alignments of conservative and liberal doctrine, Judicial Dictatorship will be of interest to students and professionals in law, political scientists, and those interested in U.S. history.

Why did formerly independent Chilean judges, trained under and appointed by democratic governments, facilitate and condone the illiberal, antidemocratic, and anti-legal policies of the Pinochet regime? Challenging the assumption that adjudication in non-democratic settings is fundamentally different and less puzzling than it is in democratic regimes, this book offers a longitudinal analysis of judicial behavior, demonstrating striking continuity in judicial performance across regimes in Chile. The work explores the relevance of judges' personal policy preferences, social class, and legal philosophy, but argues that institutional factors best explain the persistent failure of judges to take stands in defense of rights and rule of law principles. Specifically, the institutional structure and ideology of the Chilean judiciary, grounded in the ideal of judicial apoliticism, furnished judges with professional understandings and incentives that left them unequipped and disinclined to take stands in defense of liberal democratic principles, before, during, and after the authoritarian interlude.

This book is a study of how institutional instability affects judicial behavior under dictatorship and democracy.

It is widely believed that autocratic regimes cannot limit their power through institutions of their own making. This book presents a surprising challenge to this view. It demonstrates that the Chilean armed forces were constrained by institutions of their own design. Based on extensive documentation of military decision-making, much of it long classified and unavailable, this book reconstructs the politics of institutions within the recent Chilean dictatorship (1973–1990). It examines the structuring of institutions at the apex of the military junta, the relationship of military rule with the prior constitution, the intra-military conflicts that led to the promulgation of the 1980 constitution, the logic of institutions contained in the new constitution, and how the constitution constrained the military junta after it went into force in 1981. This provocative account reveals the standard account of the dictatorship as a personalist regime with power concentrated in Pinochet to be grossly inaccurate.