Responsive Judicial Review “Light” in Central and Eastern Europe – A New Sheriff in Town?

Abstract

This article engages with Ros Dixon’s theory of “Responsive Judicial Review” (oup, 2023). It argues that Central and Eastern European jurisdictions with specialized constitutional courts face two major obstacles to engage fully in responsive judicial review – legal formalism and the very fact that constitutional review is centralized into one institution, which discourages pluralistic debates about the constitution and limits the room for dialogue between the constitutional court and other actors. Even the Czech Constitutional Court that meets all three Dixon’s preconditions for courts’ ability to engage in responsive judicial review (judicial independence, political support, and remedial power) and is probably the most Elyan constitutional court in cee faces several obstacles to responsive judging. As a result, its responsiveness has been selective. Nevertheless, although full-fledged responsive judicial review is difficult to achieve in cee countries in the short term, their constitutional courts can, as the Czech Constitutional Court shows, exercise responsive judicial review “light”. We argue that such “light version” of responsive judicial review would still be a great improvement and we provide several proposals how to increase the likelihood that it happens.