Although democracy is today the most common form of government, the Law and Economics literature has neglected for a long time the role of social preferences in lawmaking. This article aims at capturing the endogenous process of lawmaking: in democracies, people partly determine the law they...

The judicialization of politics, or alternatively, politization of the judiciary has been much discussed over the last twenty years. Despite this, the way judges influence fiscal policy outcomes remains, to a large extent, unexplored. This paper attempts, at least partially, to fill this...

The abstract nature of Constitutional principles, such as the social state principle, requires further interpretation to determine their concrete substance. Their realization is primarily the duty of politics and the legislator. Yet the Constitutional Courts can substantially contribute to...

Few studies on federalism analyze the role of courts as safeguards of the federal arrangement, and those that do tend to be too optimistic about what courts can do. This article analyzes the effect of judicial review on the interaction between the central and a regional government in a...