The Role of Democratic Majority Understandings of Rights in Rosalind Dixon’s Responsive Judicial Review

In Responsive Judicial Review, Rosalind Dixon argues that courts should confine themselves to giving effect to “democratic majority understandings of rights.” This is the crucial move that is explored in this article. While Dixon is in good company in making the case for a democratically responsive approach to judicial review, and while there may be good reasons for judicial review to be democratically responsive in a broad sense, there are risks to her more specific suggestion that judicial review should be disciplined by democratic majority understandings of rights. To illustrate these risks, the article turns to the example of provincial rules restricting trans and non-binary children’s pronoun use at school, which are currently the subject of litigation in Saskatchewan and Alberta.