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Political science 217
6. Constitutional courts
We reach (finally) the point of logical weakness in the defence of constitutionalism
as an ‘approved‘ form of government. The constitution specifies the scope
of government, the scope of representation, the nature of political and personal
rights and the procedure by which they are to be sustained. In some cases there
is dispute about the meaning of these rights: what then? An alternative is
posed :
Either this is a political matter, and the highest political organ, government or
parliament or some combination of them, must judge. But what then of protection
of the citizen against political action?
Or it is a judicial matter, to be settled by a Supreme Court independent of
politics. But can such a court remain independent, if it is called upon to judge
matters of the highest political importance?
There is a subordinate difficulty: that many modern constitutions specify
rights of a humanitarian kind: the right to education according to one’s capacity,
the right to work for which one is fitted, the right to suitable maintenance in
old age, and so on. Undoubtedly it is not easy to make such rights ‘justiciable’;
but doubtless it could be done if the major problems of constitutional interpretation
were satisfactorily solved.
It wil be obvious that there is here a large field for empirical inquiry designed
to relate the dilemma posed logically to the actual experience of politics. One
must report that much work has been done on the composition and political
action of the United States Supreme Court, and on the work of American
judges at lower levels; very little, on the rBle of courts in other States claiming
to be constitutional, except in relation to criminological studies.
These problems arise also concerning the functions of law and adjudication
in the international community, and they are closely related to such problems
as the scope and application of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Here one crosses a borderline into the territory of ethical norms; there is
nevertheless an indissoluble relationship between ethics and practice, and political
science has not yet done enough to establish what is in fact the practice of
civil liberties in constitutional States.
V. CONCLUDING REMARKS
Tt wil be obvious to the reader that political science is deficient in taxonomy,
and to a considerable extent culture bound. These weaknesses have made it
hard to present an analysis of work in progress within a framework which can
command universal assent. They also make it difficult to strike a fair balance
between the contributions of different schools and scholars, and to indicate
confidently where the research frontiers now lie. A further difficulty is that
political science (though few would now claim that it is a master science) lives
by contact with the other social sciences. No development in them is alien to it,
and much more might have been done to illustrate connections between thepres-