Gerichte als politische Akteure

Courts make a key contribution to the functioning of a political system and to political processes in democracies. Depending on the design of judicial control regimes, they take part in preserving the coherence of the norm system, upholding fundamental rights as well as maintaining and stabilising the function of their respective political system. Their political role goes beyond judicial review in a narrow sense, and the functional contribution of constitutional justice to a political system is only partially recognisable if one focuses on the jurisprudence of a constitutional court or a supreme court. Using the historical development of constitutional justice and in discourse with central research approaches, the author of this book proposes a redefinition of the terms ‘constitutional court’ and ‘constitutional jurisdiction’ for comparative politics and develops a basic model of judicial control regimes.