Grappling with Judicial Populism: A Law and Social Inquiry Symposium

Abstract The label ‘populist’ has been used in recent years by scholars and journalists to describe judicial behavior in a diverse set of countries. Yet judicial populism has to date not been the subject of comparative scholarly inquiry. This symposium aims to launch just such a comparative analysis, bringing together work by scholars with diverse disciplinary and geographic expertise to grapple critically with the phenomenon of judicial populism. In this introductory article, symposium organizers Lisa Hilbink and Yasser Kureshi distill and synthesize the findings and arguments from the four individual articles in the symposium to address three main questions: (1) What is judicial populism? (2) Where does judicial populism come from? and (3) Do populist courts benefit or undermine democracy? They discuss how the contributions to the symposium speak to each of these questions, in turn, generating a scholarly discussion, across disciplines and contexts, with which others can engage moving forward. To this end, they cap the introduction with some suggestions for future research.