CCOP Home
Director's Statement
Working Papers
Research Awards
Seminars
|
Martin Shapiro
CCOP Working Paper #2000-09
January, 2000
Not so very long ago it was impossible to interest
students of comparative politics in law and courts which they thought
had little or nothing to do with the politics of the nations they
studied. Simple propositions that were truisms among law and courts
specialists, such as that litigation was an alternative form of
interest group lobbying, were foreign to comparativists who largely
stuck to the standard layman's view that courts are or ought to
be "independent" and "neutral" that is separated from politics and
policy making. Americanists, of course, knew better, but that generally
was attributed to the peculiar place of the U.S. Supreme Court's
power of constitutional judicial review in American politics. Three
changes in the real world have now begun to persuade comparativists
of the political functions of law and courts. One is the spread
of successful constitutional judicial review to a large number of
Western European states. If judges declaring laws unconstitutional
is political in the U. S. it probably is in France, Germany, Italy
and Spain too. The second is the political evolution - or lack of
it - in the former Soviet Union and its former satellites. It has
become far too evident that success or failure in building a working
court system and rule of law is a crucial element in national political
and economic development. The third new political phenomenon is
the European Union. As American specialists in comparative politics
began to study the E. U., it became difficult for them to ignore
the crucial role of the European Court of Justice in its development
and the degree to which the E. U. itself was a structure of laws
which owed its existence and evolution to innovations in law. Moreover,
as these three great changes were taking place, the Gods of Behaviorism
were marching along to the discovery of the "new institutionalism"
in which formal rules were again seen as politically significant.
|