Guest Editor’s Introduction: Constitutional Landmark Judgments in the MENA Region

Eleonora Bottini

University of Caen Normandy

After three previous symposia (on the Commonwealth, South and Central America and Asia), I am especially pleased to announce the fourth symposium of the ‘Constitutional Landmark Judgments Project.’ This symposium concentrates on the Middle East and North Africa region and features posts by Valentina Rita Scotti and Ilayda Eskitascioglu (Turkey), Tamara El Khoury (Lebanon), Eman M. Rashwan (Egypt), Hana Ben Abda (Tunisia) and Sanaa Alsarghali (Palestine). The MENA region is experiencing a transition from a constitutional viewpoint - e.g. institutions in charge of constitutional review have gained relevance in recent decades. New publications, such as the Journal of Constitutional Law in the Middle East and North Africa, and research programs are encouraging a global comparative dialogue with the region by facilitating access to information and critical analysis. Those objectives are shared by the ‘Constitutional Landmark Judgments Project’.  

As the project advances, its theoretical and analytical objective is consolidating as well: the construction of a definition of the concept of ‘constitutional landmark judgment’ as analytically useful for comparative constitutional lawyers. The need for a more precise conceptual framework of landmark judgments comes from the variety of terms used when intuitively discussing fundamental cases: leading cases, great cases, landmark, iconic or revolutionary judgments, “grands arrêts”. All those expressions are often used interchangeably and show the polysemic character of the concept.  

Drawing from what we have learned from three previous symposia of the ‘Constitutional Landmark Judgments Project’, in what follows, I briefly discuss the features/characteristics that, so far, may be identified as common to landmark judgements; I will then turn to make few remarks about methodology. 

Common Characteristics of Constitutional Landmark Judgments  

Timothy Endicott provides an insightful analysis of landmark judgments: “a judicial decision will give a guide to the landscape if it changed the law, so that understanding the decision will help us to understand how the law developed. And it may also be a landmark if the court’s explanation of the law influenced later decisions (or explanations of the law by scholars and historians), or simply by virtue of the usefulness of the report of the decision for explaining the law today”. Taking a similar approach, I will describe four common characteristics that have begun to appear through the selection of a single judgment for each country and its commentary in the previous symposia of the ‘Constitutional Landmark Judgments Project’. This list is not exhaustive and I expect it to be enriched with further collective research.  

The first common characteristic is the significance of the judgment: this characteristic is both essential and potentially problematic. In fact, if the general intuition shared by authors is that a landmark judgment is a significant one, issued by a significant court which has sufficient legitimacy to render meaningful decisions (both with respect to the legal reasoning and its impact on other institutions), this is a presumption that may not hold in every jurisdiction. As Melissa Crouch points out, if a court has little legitimacy and/or if it hears few cases, its judgments might not be significant enough to be called landmarks. This problem arose with Japan, where the Supreme Court has been so “discreet” in its decision-making that the it is difficult to select a landmark judgement from the limited number of cases. As a result, is it possible that some jurisdictions do not have any landmark judgments? Even though one should be wary of making assumptions that might not hold in every jurisdiction, it seems possible to still identify a constitutional landmark decision in those jurisdictions by considering the significance of a particular judgement in light of the context of specific jurisdiction under scrutiny. For instance, in the case of Myanmar, the anti-democratic content of the judgment was relevant to determine  its significance, while in the case of Japan, Akiko Ejima decided to re-examine the very first judgment of the Supreme Court in light of the concept of landmark judgments. There is no doubt that the discussion about the scope limits of “significance” as a feature of landmark judgements will continue to come up in other jurisdictions, where both the lack of legitimacy of courts and the low level (or absence) of activity will have to be taken into account as an element in the theoretical debate about landmark judgments.  

Secondly, constitutional landmark judgments represent constitutional changes towards a new direction. Those changes can be very different. Often, the role of the courts themselves takes a new direction starting with a specific judgment which can be the very first of a new court (as for example in the case of South Africa and Japan) or because the court takes a new stance as constitutional guardian (see e.g. the cases of Australia and Guatemala). In some cases, the constitutional change appears gradually and the landmark judgments are the ones identifying such incremental changes (such as in New Zealand and Singapore). This feature must also be understood in a critical sense: it should not be interpreted as a constitutional turn in the direction of liberal constitutionalism. If in some cases it appears that a landmark judgment can be considered so because it upheld separation of powers or the rule of law (see South Korea and Argentina), in others a landmark judgment is not necessarily an evolution towards the improvement of liberal constitutional democracy. In fact, landmark judgments can represent the consolidation of the illiberal turn of a political regime (as is the case of Hong Kong and Myanmar). This insight into authoritarian regimes shows the importance of studying landmark judgments even if courts use them to further an illiberal political agenda. Importantly, while reflecting about the features of landmark judgments, one should be wary of the axiological bias that they should be a way of advancing a certain political agenda.  

The third common feature, intrinsically linked to the previous one, appears to be the long-lasting effect of the novelty of the judicial solution: the constitutional order is not the same before and after the landmark judgment. For a constitutional judgment to be interpreted as a landmark, not only a new direction was taken (a new principle, or a new fundamental right, a new application of the law, a new source or interpretation of constitutional law), but consequences of this novelty should last in the future. The long-lasting effect does not mean that a landmark judgment can never be overturned (or that it loses its ‘status’ if overturned); but an exceptional judicial decision whose effects do not have a durable impact can hardly be defined as a landmark judgment. This characteristic is linked to the fact that extra-legal effects are at least as important as strictly legal consequences to identify a landmark judgment, as I have previously suggested. 

The fourth common feature of constitutional landmark judgments consists in their external and internal influence. As explained by Jakab, Itzkovitch and Dyevre, “landmark judgments tend to set the tone of a court’s jurisprudence, as they often provide the lens through which court watchers recognize the defining traits of a court’s approach to constitutional argumentation. For the same reason, they probably exert more influence on the practices of other judges, both at home and abroad, than do less salient decisions”. Not only are landmark judgments influential, but they also can be influenced by external considerations. As I have previously suggested, in some countries the use of international and comparative law in the reasoning of the courts is part of the reason why a constitutional judgment is considered to be a landmark. The existence of a regional system for the protection of human rights (as the case of Turkey will show in this symposium, in relation with the European Court of Human rights) can be a significant factor. The use of international human rights law instruments and jurisprudence in domestic landmark judgments may have to do with efforts by domestic judges to make those decisions more acceptable to the community at hand as well as to draw legitimacy from the international sphere. Some constitutional judges sitting in high courts may think that a strong change in their jurisprudence would be more acceptable domestically if it is supported by international law and jurisprudence. At the same time, it can also be considered as a weakness for a national judgment to be primarily based on exterior sources, as the cases of Argentina and Ecuador show.  

Great Cases, Bad Law? A Few Remarks on Methodology  

For Justice Holmes of the United States Supreme Court, “great cases like hard cases make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their importance . . . but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment” (Northern Securities Co. v. United States, 193 U.S. 197, 400 (1904) Holmes, dissenting). The risk evoked by Holmes must be taken seriously when discussing the usefulness of constitutional landmark judgments for research in comparative constitutional law. It is possible that focusing on such judgments results in a distorting effect on some aspects of a jurisdiction, at the expenses of others equally important elements. Also, asking authors to choose only one judgment per jurisdiction is a significant limit. It can be argued that some legal systems have more than one landmark judgment on constitutional issues, especially where older and more prolific courts exist. That is why the endeavour of developing a conceptual framework of landmark judgements is so important. Once it is established, it would then be possible to identify and classify all landmark judgments in specific jurisdictions, if more than one are identified. Of course, to avoid the risk of the distorting effect that this particular lens might provoke, landmark judgments cannot become the only viewpoint for comparing constitutional systems or even apex courts. They are nonetheless “a guide for the journey” into a given constitutional system, as a landmark is “a guide to a landscape” (Endicott 2019). 

Moreover, the reasoning that appears from the authors’ justification of their choice of judgments gives an insight into the salient characteristics of a given jurisdiction and for this reason represents an invaluable tool for comparatists. Also, it is arguable that Holmes’ consideration applies more to national discussions than global comparative ones. The risk of appealing to political feelings in the aftermath of a controversial judgment is considerably reduced by the need to explain both the choice and the judgment to a foreign audience, which is the starting point of the ‘Constitutional Landmark Judgments Project’. By inviting the authors to give a key for understanding a case to readers unfamiliar with their legal system, it is arguably possible to achieve a certain ‘externality’ from the internal political debate of a specific legal order, avoiding at least some of the biases of great cases.   

These considerations give an essential role to the authors: their point of view matters greatly in order to determine which judgment is considered a landmark. Commenting on the scope, context and consequences of the judgment also attributes an essential function to scholarly opinion. This project is not the only one to give such importance to scholars: in the project Comparative Constitutional Reasoning by Jakab, Itzkovitch and Dyevre, the forty selected judgments were submitted to a list of constitutional scholars to ensure that they were representative of the doctrinal opinion of the same country. Without using the exact same methodology, this project is equally based on the idea that scholarly opinion matters. Our approach was to contact primarily early career and exclusively female scholars. This choice creates an opportunity to expand the network of comparative constitutional scholars while giving voice to authors that are not always the “obvious choice” to represent a jurisdiction.  

I am thrilled to launch the fourth symposium on constitutional landmark judgments and would like to take the opportunity to thank the authors from the MENA region who will be contributing to this discussion, as well as the IACL-AIDC Blog for hosting it. I am certain that this symposium will allow us to collectively move towards a more detailed definition of constitutional landmark judgements.  

Eleonora Bottini is Professor of Public Law at the University of Caen Normandy. 

Suggested citation: Eleonora Bottini, ‘Guest Editor’s Introduction: Constitutional Landmark Judgments in the MENA Region’,  IACL-AIDC Blog (15 June 2021) https://blog-iacl-aidc.org/menaregion/15-5-21-guesteditorsintroduction.