Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
Supreme Court rulings and bills introduced by the government have been steadily chipping away at harsher sentencing and stuff like no-bail provisions for repeat offenders over the past couple of years. It's a pretty clear trend.
A quick search of news articles shows it's a phenomenon that is observed throughout most of the western world.
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There's been a general trend throughout the democratic world of more and more power being held by constitutional judges instead of by lawmakers, resulting in more and more policy being dictated by lawyers, judges, scholars, and other unelected elites, and less and less policy being dictated by the voting public (who, in a democracy, are supposed to be the ones holding power).
Of course, you can't have a functional/sustainable democracy without checks and balances. A judicial branch and a constitution are necessities. But I think we've gone too far the other way in most Western countries.
This isn't just a right wing worry either. Look at the USA, for example.
If you look at what's happening in Israel right now, where a fiery dispute about where the balance of power should be drawn on legislative vs. judicial is putting the country on the brink of civil war, this can be seen as a warning for what can happen when constitutional courts become too activist and start to make large chunks of electorate feel like their democracy is a judicial dictatorship.