Giurisdizioni costituzionali e politica: tendenze e crisi recenti nel diritto comparato

Tensions between the judicial and the political branches have recently marked the global landscape, affecting unstable systems alongside long-lasting democracies. This paper places particular emphasis on those countries and jurisdictions which have experienced a significant worsening of the relationship between courts and politics, in particular with regard to the issues of judicial appointments, constitutional adjudication, and the separation of powers and constitutional checks and balances more broadly speaking. It offers a novel way to map the cases, considering both perspectives: A) from the perspective of political powers, it delves into judicial appointments’ rules manipulation through the threefold categorization of bending the rules (USA and Spain), violating the rules (Poland) and amending the rules (Hungary and Mexico); then, it analyzes the hypothesis of legislative override of judgments (UK); B) from the perspective of the courts, it examines deferent attitudes (France, USA, Ecuador) vis-à-vis the exercise of constitutional adjudication on constitutional amendments (Israel and – almost – Mexico). The contribution concludes with a set of comparative legal insights which are drawn from these countries’ experience and are argued to be of crucial importance for contemporary constitutional thought.