This collection examines the justifications for using bills of rights to protect fundamental human rights and the mechanisms for enforcing provisions in those documents. Articles deal with different forms of judicial enforcement and with legislative enforcement, of rights protected by such documents. The collection includes a road-map for evaluating the effectiveness of these alternative enforcement mechanisms.

Mark Tushnet is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School, USA. He is the co-author of four casebooks, including the casebook on constitutional law most widely used in the United States, has written fourteen books, including a two-volume work on the life of Justice Thurgood Marshall, and has edited eight others. He was President of the Association of American Law Schools in 2003. In 2002 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Contents; Series Preface; Introduction; Bills of Rights and Democratic Self- Governance: A right-based critique of constitutional rights, Jeremy Waldron; Judicial review and democratic principles: 2 theories, D.J. Galligan; Accountability, liberty and the constitution, Rebecca Brown. Judicial Enforcement of Bills of Rights: The new commonwealth model of constitutionalism, Stephen Gardbaum; Learning to live with the override, Lorraine Eisenstat Weinrib; The charter dialogue between courts and legislatures (or perhaps the charter of rights isn't such a bad thing after all), Peter W. Hogg and Alison A. Bushell; Legislative invalidation, human rights protection and S 4 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, Janet McLean; New forms of judicial review and the persistence of rights- and democracy-based worries, Mark Tushnet. Legislative Enforcement of Bills of Rights: Origin and scope of the American doctrine of constitutional law, James B. Thayer; Institutional design of a Thayerian Congress, Elizabeth Garrett and Adrian Vermeule; Judicial review and the protection of constitutional rights, Wojciech Sadurski; Index.