How 4 Democracies Decide If Laws Are Valid

Judicial review sounds like a dusty legal concept, but it's the mechanism that decides whether a law lives or dies — and different democracies have built wildly different machinery for that decision. This episode walks through four systems: Ireland and the US with their written constitutions, Israel where the Supreme Court reviews laws despite having no constitution at all, and the UK where Parliament is supreme and courts can only issue strongly worded letters. We explore how standing rules determine who can challenge a law, the counter-majoritarian difficulty of unelected judges overruling legislatures, and why Israel's 2023-2024 judicial reform crisis became a circular legal drama about courts policing their own power.