—Richard Albert, Boston College Law School
In this installment of our new video interview series at I-CONnect, I interview Joel Colón-Ríos on the subject of judicial review. His most recent paper, appearing here in the new journal Global Constitutionalism, addresses judicial review and is entitled “A New Typology of Judicial Review of Legislation.”
In the interview, we discuss his four-part typology of judicial review, Commonwealth and Latin American constitutions, as well as his current work-in-progress entitled “What is a Constitutional Transition.” I also ask him how he became interested in comparative public law.
Joel Colón-Ríos is a Senior Lecturer at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, where he teaches courses in public law, comparative law and comparative constitutionalism. His research concerns comparative constitutional law, constitutional theory, democratic theory and Latin American constitutionalism.
The full interview runs 21 minutes, and is available here.
Comments
2 responses to “Video Interview: A New Typology of Judicial Review Featuring Joel Colón-Ríos”
Just in addition to the examples of weak forma judicial review in Latin America; the Brazilian constitution in 1937 has also a clause enabling the President to re-submit to the Congress, a law that was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. In that case, if a super-majority (2/3) approved the law, it will overrule the judicial decision, just like in the Canadian model – and that decision, in the former Brazilian system has no temporal limitation. Tha clause was nor repeated in the constituions that followed, and is not present in the 1988’s Chart,
When it comes to the typology proposed by Colón-Ríos, in Brazil the Supreme Court is allowed to declare unconstitutional, the result of the parliamentary deliberation expressed by constitutional amendments – and that kind of ruling happens regularly. One should have in mind that the Brazilian constitution reached 26 years last October, and that we already have 83 constitutional amendments.
Hello Vanice, I was not aware of the clause you mention. I think the two-third majority requirement makes it difficult to see it as as an institutionalization of weak-form judicial review, but it is a very interesting example, particularly if the process involving the President is less stringent than the one required for ordinary constitutional amendments.