Balanced Constitutionalism

The Human Rights Act (HRA) of the UK, 1998, unlike systems of parliamentary sovereignty and judicial supremacy, promised a new, 'balanced' model for the protection of rights, which conferred courts with limited power of review over legislation. This book examines the promise of the new model against its performance in practice by comparing judicial review under the HRA to an exemplar of the old model of judicial review, the Indian Constitution. Balanced constitutionalism is not achieved through the legislative rejection of judicial decision-making about rights. Instead, the nature of the remedy under the HRA enables British courts to assert their genuine interpretations of rights in situations in which Indian courts find it difficult to do so.