This paper will explore how debates about judicial review (its justification and its limits) reflect debates about the meaning and content of constitutional principles, as well as competing political value systems.

The paper will tell a story about how neo-republican theory can help us explain whose decisions are, and should be, subject to judicial review.

This paper will argue that balancing principle and pragmatism is the perennial challenge for apex courts, and that recent cases can be explained as re-balancing after the law has gone too far in one direction or the other to be workable.

This paper looks at these three methodological concepts or devices and their interrelationship, suggesting there is virtue in exposing and explicating their role in judicial review cases.