Responsive judicial remedies

Judicial remedies are the critical means by which courts worldwide enforce and implement constitutional rights. Yet constitutional remedies were largely overlooked by early political process theorists, such as John Hart Ely. Contemporary comparative political process theory (CPPT) or comparative representation-reinforcing theory (CRRT) pays much greater attention to remedial questions, including the use of a range of ‘weak’ judicial remedies. These CPPT/CRRT scholars have highlighted the risks as well as advantages associated with the use of such remedies, but they have not reached any consensus on how to strike this balance and optimise their use. The article therefore draws on one specific recent version of CPPT/CRRT, namely the theory of ‘responsive judicial review’, to propose one way to strike this balance, namely: In cases impacting the ‘democratic minimum core’, courts should generally prefer strong remedies, with delayed relief only applied for prudential reasons; for other cases, courts should deploy more dialogic remedies, but generally these delayed or suspended remedies should be accompanied by a judicial statement of pre-defined strong remedies that take effect automatically in the event of legislative inaction. In this way, this article suggests that courts can give weak remedies ‘bite’, and hence promote actual legislative debate and dialogue, rather than incentivise legislative inaction after their rulings.