Tensions between judicial and political power have recently marked the global landscape, affecting even unstable systems alongside long-standing democracies. This paper focuses on countries and jurisdictions that have experienced a significant deterioration in the relationship between courts and politics, with a particular emphasis on issues related to judicial appointments, constitutional rulings, and, more broadly, separation of powers and constitutional checks and balances. It offers a novel way of mapping the cases, considering both perspectives:
A) From the perspective of political powers, it analyses the manipulation of the rules of judicial appointments through the threefold categorisation of bending the rules (USA and Spain), violating the rules (Poland) and changing the rules (Hungary and Mexico); moreover, it analyses the hypothesis of legislative override of judgments (United Kingdom).
B) From the perspective of the courts, it examines attitudes of deference (France, USA, Ecuador) toward the exercise of constitutional adjudication on constitutional amendments (Israel and - almost - Mexico).
The contribution concludes with a set of comparative law insights drawn from the experience of these countries and deemed of crucial importance to contemporary constitutional thought.
Sabrina Ragone is an associate professor of Comparative Law at the University of Bologna (since 2017). Currently, she is a Fernand Braudel Fellow at the Department of Law of the European University Institute, in Florence. She is also a Senior Research Affiliate at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (Heidelberg), where she pursued her research from 2015 to 2017. Previously, she was Investigadora García Pelayo at the Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales in Madrid (2012-2015) and postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (2011-2012). She has been visiting professor and scholar in the USA (e.g., Boston College, Michigan, Texas A&M) and in prestigious Spanish, German, French and Latin American universities. In 2023 she was awarded the Jean Monnet Chair ROLLBACK Rule of Law Backsliding in Europe and previously the Jean Monnet Modules EU_SOCIAL European Solidarity: Comparative Interdisciplinary Approach to Law, Politics and Social Challenges (2022/2025) and CRISES Critical Risks for Integration and Solidarity in the European Space (2018/2021). Since 2023, she is leading the national project, funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, SPACE, which involves five Universities of the country. She has published several books (among which Ragone and Smorto, Comparative Law. A Very Short Introduction, OUP, 2023; Ragone, Parlamentarismos y crisis económica: afectación de los encajes constitucionales en Italia y España, Bosch, 2020; or Ragone, I controlli giurisdizionali sulle revisioni costituzionali. Profili teorici e comparativi, BUP, 2011), and over a hundred journal articles and book chapters; she has edited six collective volumes, and six international special issues. Her scholarship, in English, Italian, Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese, delves into comparative methodology, constitutional adjudication, decentralization, and European constitutional law.