Abstract: Scholars who write about public justification and deliberative democracy usually have little to say about judicial review. This neglect may be due to their preoccupation with citizenship. Rather than putting institutions front and center, as many empirical political scientists do, they write about how ordinary people must think and behave in certain ways when they participate in politics. There is nothing wrong with this focus, and those who hope that Americans politics can become more principled and more deliberative have come up with some ingenious plans for adapting the "ideal of face-to-face democracy to the large nation-state." As I see it, the prominence of the judiciary in our contemporary politics also merits an account of the proper relationship between judicial decision making and the ideal of public deliberation that deliberative democrats envision. Any theory of deliberative democracy that is premised on the notion that citizens are supposed to deliberate in the public sphere cannot pretend that courts do not exist and overlook the fact that most Americans continue to put their faith in them.
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-08-31
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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