Answer:
Judicial review is the power of the courts to declare that acts of the other branches of government are unconstitutional, and thus unenforceable. For example if Congress were to pass a law banning newspapers from printing information about certain political matters, courts would have the authority to rule that this law violates the First Amendment, and is therefore unconstitutional. State courts also have the power to strike down their own state’s laws based on the state or federal constitutions.
Today, we take judicial review for granted. In fact, it is one of the main characteristics of government in the United States. On an almost daily basis, court decisions come down from around the country striking down state and federal rules as being unconstitutional. Some of the topics of these laws in recent times include same sex marriage bans, voter identification laws, gun restrictions, government surveillance programs and restrictions on abortion.
Other countries have also gotten in on the concept of judicial review. A Romanian court recently ruled that a law granting immunity to lawmakers and banning certain types of speech against public officials was unconstitutional. Greek courts have ruled that certain wage cuts for public employees are unconstitutional. The legal system of the European Union specifically gives the Court of Justice of the European Union the power of judicial review. The power of judicial review is also afforded to the courts of Canada, Japan, India and other countries. Clearly, the world trend is in favor of giving courts the power to review the acts of the other branches of government.
However, it was not always so. In fact, the idea that the courts have the power to strike down laws duly passed by the legislature is not much older than is the United States. In the civil law system, judges are seen as those who apply the law, with no power to create (or destroy) legal principles. In the (British) common law system, on which American law is based, judges are seen as sources of law, capable of creating new legal principles, and also capable of rejecting legal principles that are no longer valid. However, as Britain has no Constitution, the principle that a court could strike down a law as being unconstitutional was not relevant in Britain. Moreover, even to this day, Britain has an attachment to the idea of legislative supremacy. Therefore, judges in the United Kingdom do not have the power to strike down legislation.
Explanation:
nationalparalegal.edu /JudicialReview.aspx
Answer:
In 1215, a band of rebellious medieval barons forced King John of England to agree to a laundry list of concessions later called the Great Charter, or in Latin, Magna Carta. Centuries later, America’s Founding Fathers took great inspiration from this medieval pact as they forged the nation’s founding documents—including the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Explanation:
For 18th-century political thinkers like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, Magna Carta was a potent symbol of liberty and the natural rights of man against an oppressive or unjust government. The Founding Fathers’ reverence for Magna Carta had less to do with the actual text of the document, which is mired in medieval law and outdated customs, than what it represented—an ancient pact safeguarding individual liberty.
“For early Americans, Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence were verbal representations of what liberty was and what government should be—protecting people rather than oppressing them,” says John Kaminski, director of the Center for the Study of the American Constitution at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Much in the same way that for the past 100 years the Statue of Liberty has been a visual representation of freedom, liberty, prosperity and welcoming.”
The injustices of communism were not limited to mass murder alone. Even those fortunate enough to survive still were subjected to severe repression, including violations of freedom, of speech, freedom of religion, loss of property rights, and the criminalization of ordinary economic activity
Crimea. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 to strengthen the “brotherly ties between the Ukrainian and Russian peoples.” However, since the fall of the union, many Russian nationalists in both Russia and Crimea have longed for a return of the peninsula. The city of Sevastopol is home port for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the dominant maritime force in the region.
African Americans continued to face a wide range of threats in the south, many of which were violent in nature such as threats of lynching and murder. Congress initially sent federal troops into the region to attempt to enforce the Reconstructions laws and mitigate these threats.