Contemporary democracies have granted an expansive amount of power to unelected judges that sit in constitutional or supreme courts. This power shift has never been easily squared with the institutional backbones through which democracy is popularly supposed to be structured. The best institutional translation of a 'government of the people, by the people and for the people' is usually expressed through elections and electoral representation in parliaments.
Judicial review of legislation has been challenged as bypassing that common sense conception of democratic rule. The alleged...