From the counter-majoritarian difficulty to an interinstitutional dialogue: Mechanisms of balance in the relationship between judicial review and the legislature

Abstract

The launching pad of this paper is the so-called counter majoritarian difficulty, and its aim is to look into some particular mechanisms found in comparative law which could overcome it. In this sense, after a brief incursion into the concepts of “dialogic constitutionalism” and “new Commonwealth constitutionalism”, the article relates the notwithstanding clause in the Canadian constitution with some types of constitutional rulings that have been being passed in Europe over the last decades. The idea is that, by different means, both mechanisms allow both to overcome the above mentioned difficulty and to clarify the role that judicial review must play in a new context of division of powers.