Proportionality: New Frontiers, New Challenges

Vicki C. Jackson · Mark Tushnet

Sep 2017 · Cambridge University Press

About this ebook

With contributions from leading scholars in constitutional law, this volume examines how carefully designed and limited doctrines of proportionality can improve judicial decision-making, how it is applied in different jurisdictions, its role on constitutionalism outside the courts, and whether the principle of proportionality actually advances or detracts from democracy. Contributions from some of the seminal thinkers on the development of scholarship on proportionality (e.g. Alexy, Barak, and Beatty) extend their prior work and engage in an important dialogue on the topic. Some offer substantial critiques, others defend the doctrine and offer important clarifications and extensions of their prior work. Throughout, the authors engage not only with case law from around the world but also with existing scholarly treatments of the subject. Mathematical treatments are avoided, making the book accessible to readers from both 'soft' and hard' social science backgrounds.

About the author

Vicki C. Jackson is Thurgood Marshall Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, Massachusetts. She is the author of Constitutional Engagement in a Transnational Era (2010), and co-author, with Mark Tushnet, of Comparative Constitutional Law (3rd edition, 2014) and Defining the Field of Comparative Constitutional Law (2002). She has served on the Advisory Board of Trustees, International Association of Women Judges and on the Executive Committee, International Association of Constitutional Law.

Mark Tushnet is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, Massachusetts. He has served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall of the US Supreme Court. His book on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) campaign against segregated education won the Littleton-Griswold Prize from the American Historical Association. He was president of the Association of American Law Schools in 2003, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Law Institute.