In early nineteenth-century America, Alexis de Tocqueville (1835) famously observed, “[S]carcely any political question arises…that is not resolved, sooner or later, into a judicial question.” That may have been a considerable exaggeration at the time, but today, the dynamic Tocqueville highlighted marks many constitutional democracies in which independent courts are vested with powers of judicial review. In such countries, political actors, organizations, and ordinary individuals who become enmeshed in political conflicts have strong incentives to frame their desires as constitutional or statutory claims and ask courts to vindicate them.

As a result, in the early twenty-first century, courts have become versatile actors in the governance of many constitutional democracies, and judges and justices play multiple roles in politics and policymaking. *As many observers have noted, politically consequential courts have emerged in new democracies from Korea to South Africa to Brazil and beyond; courts in more established democracies such as Canada and New Zealand have been given or have assumed more power to protect individual rights and invalidate government policies; and both the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) have taken on dramatic roles in European governance.