Evolution of the Judicial Role in Consolidating the Foundations of Rational Legislative Policy - Judicial Review of the Choice of Legislative Alternatives as a Constitutional Review Methodology at The European Court of Justice as a case study.

It's widely recognized that constitutional review should be balanced, by imposing self-limits which defer to the broad discretion of the legislators. Accordingly, Legislations in economic and social areas are immune from constitutional review as long as they are proportionate to their stated legislative aims.



However, in recent years, several constitutional courts around the world innovated a new methodology of constitutional review. This new type of constitutional review focuses on reviewing the law-making process. Specifically, the role of the constitutional judge is to review the legislator’s choice among legislative and policy alternatives. That’s why the current President of the Court of Justice of the European Union, Judge Koen Lenaerts, calls this type of constitutional review as “process – oriented review”.

This innovation in constitutional review methodology coincided with the development in the law-making process in light of “Good Governance Principles.”



This research seeks to shed light on the constitutional review of the legislator’s choice and balancing process among policy and legislative alternatives while making the law.



In the introductory chapter we will focus on the traditional constitutional review methodology which is adopted by the Egyptian Constitutional Supreme Court and comparative constitutional courts.



In the next chapter we will talk about the new roles of the legislator under the principles of good governance and legisprudence. Then we will consider the evolution of the constitutional judge's role as complementary to the evolution of the legislator's role in the law-making process.



In the last chapter we will focus specifically on the European Union’ law making process and the role of the European Court of Justice in reviewing the process of making EU laws. This chapter will be concluded by considering the role of the Egyptian Constitutional Court in reviewing the law-making process to ascertain legislator’s adherences to the principles of rational law making.