Democracy, Liberty, and Judicial Review

Alexander Kaufman is Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Georgia. His research explores the relation of central values of the democratic tradition to issues in egalitarian justice and the basis of democratic legitimacy. He is the author of Rawls's Egalitarianism (Cambridge, 2018) and Welfare in the Kantian State (Oxford, 1999), as well as numerous articles and chapters in edited volumes.

• Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. The Majoritarian Critique and the Constitutionalist Response: 1. Majoritarian arguments; 2. Judicial review and the constitutionalist conception of democracy; 3. Bad consequences: consequentialist criticisms of judicial review; Part II. Indirect Attacks on Judicial Review: 4. The failure of originalism as a theory of legal reasoning; 5. An economic theory of law?; Part III. Democracy, Liberty, and Judicial Review: 6. What is democracy?; 7. Representation and democracy: the merger of opposites; 8. Protecting liberties in a democracy; 9. Judicial reasoning in a democracy; References; Index.

'Democracy, Liberty, and Judicial Review is an excellent deep dive into one of the fundamental questions of political theory: can a court function not as a limit on democracy, but in its service? Kaufman offers a deft and compelling answer-one that anyone grappling with this perennial question will need to contend with.' Corey Brettschneider, Professor of Political Science, Brown University