Justifying judicial review of legislatures and executives in western democracies has become a controversial business. Those aspects of rule of law theory which appear to justify judicial review are attacked as undemocratic, in that they tend to replace the will of the people with the will of the judiciary. Where review is based on a set of constitutionally entrenched rights, those rights themselves are regarded as undemocratic; even supporters of rights-based judicial review have tended to concede that the rights, however desirable in some ways, are restrictions on democratic processes, rather than essential parts of democratic constitutional institutions. This seems unnecessarily defeatist. This article seeks to defend judicial review of executive action and of parliamentary legislation, on the basis of a conception of democracy which embodies certain rights rather than being in a state of tension with them.

The argument will take the following shape. A sketch of some relevant democratic considerations in Section 1 will conclude with a description of the model of democracy which will form the basis for the remainder of the argument Section 2 will argue that the function of law in providing powers for governments to use entails legal enforcement of the limits of those powers.

As Barrett's case1long ago demonstrated, a provision in a Commonwealth Act may perform the “double function” of conferring both a jurisdiction upon a court to grant a remedy, and a “substantive statutory right or duty” upon a litigant by means of “providing that in certain circumstances a person may take proceedings in a particular court to obtain a specified remedy”. The difficulty is in divining when the Parliamentary Counsel has intended that this double function be performed. Under s 76(ii) of the Constitution, Parliament may confer jurisdiction upon a federal court in “any matter arising under any laws made by the Parliament” (emphasis added). How is one to tell if “Parliament has been too sparing in the exercise of its powers and has made only a bare grant of jurisdiction without enacting a substantive law to which the exercise of jurisdiction is referable”?

“The Official Secrets Act stiffens the spine of the secretive bureaucrat and softens the vertebrae of the press”1