Reconciling Parliamentary Sovereignty and Judicial Review: On The Theoretical and Historical Origins of the Israeli Legislative Override Power
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is often asserted that a formal constitution does not necessitate judicial review over primary legislation. Rather, a country may conceive of other mechanisms to protect the constitution from intrusion by the regular political bodies. The question arises whether the reverse holds true. Can we envision a country that exercises judicial review over primary legislation yet lacks a formal constitution? Surprisingly, Israel's constitutional system, prior to the famous 1995 United Mizrahi Bank decision, offers an affirmative answer to this question.\nThis article focuses on Israel's constitutional experience during its founding period. It further explains the unique revolutionary role performed by the Israeli Supreme Court in deciding United Mizrahi Bank against the background of parliamentary sovereignty tradition. Using Israel as a case study within a comparative constitutional framework, the article offers three important lessons: First, it explains how an American style judicial review over primary legislation may coexist with parliamentary sovereignty, notwithstanding the prevailing understanding of these two seemingly mutually exclusive frameworks. It further details the mechanisms by which judicial review can be introduced within a parliamentary sovereignty tradition. Second, it explains the theoretical and historical roots of legislative override power in common-law interpretation techniques. While the notwithstanding clause is considered a unique Canadian invention, this article suggests that Israel has exploited legislative override techniques prior to the adoption of the Canadian Charter. Last, using the Israeli and Canadian experiences, it offers several warnings about how not to interpret "notwithstanding clauses" if one desires robust constitutionalism.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".