Iddo PORAT

The purpose of my post is to situate the phenomenon of towering judges, discussed in the preceding posts, in a specific historical and global context. The context is the height of what I will call the liberal-cosmopolitan wave in global politics around the 1990s. Towering judges, I will argue, flourished during that period, and this ideological setting provided a background that was conducive to the formation of towering judges.

Sergio VERDUGO

Iddo Porat and Rehan Abeyratne identify “three dimensions along which a judge may be towering – political, institutional and jurisprudential.” To become a towering figure, a judge should tower at least in one of those dimensions. They also briefly suggest that Eugenio Valenzuela – a judge that served in the Chilean Constitutional Court in the 1980s – was a political towering judge because he helped “to oust an autocratic regime.” Why does Judge Valenzuela fit that description?

Dennis DAVIS

An appointment as the first head of a newly established Constitutional Court for a democratic South Africa may constitute a necessary but certainly is not a sufficient condition for classification as a towering judicial figure. By towering judicial figure, I mean a judge who dominates the legal field, who carves out a body of jurisprudence that shapes the law in the country for decades after his or her retirement while ensuring the institutional independence and integrity of the judiciary.

David LANDAU

The Colombian Constitutional Court is a somewhat unlikely place to find a “towering” justice. While the Court has been one of the most activist in the world since its creation in 1991, it is also a highly institutionalized body.

Mara MALAGODI

Dramatic political circumstances may give rise to a particular type of towering judicial figures. An explosive context has the potential to trigger a sort of “fight or flight” judicial response; thus, those judges who demonstrate the resilience, confidence, and moral integrity to stand their ground amidst cataclysmic events and political storms represent a subset of heroic judges.

See the full post on our Symposium Partner, the ICONnect Blog: here

Alon HAREL

Much has been written in Israel about the constitutional or, more broadly, the legal revolution instigated to a large extent by the retired, highly influential, Chief Justice Aharon Barak whose name has become identified with the new Israeli jurisprudence. In recent years however, some theorists have been talking about the counter-revolution.

Jaclyn NEO & Kevin TAN

Judges can only ‘tower’ in environs where appropriate opportunities exist for them to do so. For that reason, they are more likely to be found in common law than civil law jurisdictions. They are also more likely to emerge in younger jurisdictions where the law is less settled or where local conditions require a significant departure from the established judicial canons. On that score, a towering judge should have emerged in Singapore a long time ago…

See the full post on our Symposium Partner, the ICONnect Blog: here

Mark TUSHNET

“Towering-ness” is a relational concept. A towering judge towers over someone – her colleagues or her predecessors, for example. Seeing towering-ness as relational suggests that we can distinguish between “colleague-independent” and “colleague-dependent” conditions for towering-ness.

Gabrielle APPLEBY & Andrew LYNCH

Two figures tower over the history of the High Court of Australia: Sir Owen Dixon (1929-1964) and Sir Anthony Mason (1972-1995). While our argument is that it is Mason who has risen to be the contemporary towering jurist of Australia’s High Court, they both remain obvious contenders for the appellation of a ‘Towering Justice’ in Australia,…

See the full post on our Symposium Partner, the ICONnect Blog: here

Rosalind DIXON

The idea of a towering judge is an intriguing and important one: it invites us to focus on the role and jurisprudence of leading judges worldwide, in ways that invites a fine-grained and contextual approach to comparison. Like others, I therefore welcome the focus, and the invitation to be part of it.

Iddo PORAT and Rehan ABEYRATNE

On January 25-26, we convened a conference at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law, bringing together leading constitutional scholars to discuss a new topic in comparative perspective: ‘Towering Judges’. All told, we discussed 13 judges from 12 jurisdictions and two general papers. This Blog Symposium, co-hosted by IACL-AIDC and ICONnect, will give readers a snapshot…

Erika ARBAN & Tom Gerald DALY

This Blog Symposium is based on a recent conference on ‘Towering Judges’, organised by Rehan Abeyratne and Iddo Porat and held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law on 25-26 January 2019. The conference brought together leading constitutional scholars to discuss the topic of prominent or pivotal judges in multiple states, and from a global perspective.