After the Judicial Revolution: How Regime Politics Constituted and Constrained the Gleeson Court

Over the last thirty years, supreme courts across the common law world have been undergoing revolutionary changes in their roles and responsibilities and a concomitant global expansion of judicial power and politicization of courts. While much has been written about the events leading up to these, this book fills a gap in the literature by exploring the aftermath of such revolutionary change. The focus of the work is the judicial revolution that came to Australia’s High Court in the late 1980s and 1990s under the leadership of Chief Justice Anthony Mason and the post-revolution retrenchment that occurred during the chief justiceship of Murray Gleeson. Many expected Chief Justice Gleeson’s appointment to the High Court would mark a turning point away from the highly politicized, deeply controversial ‘activist’ jurisprudence of the Mason Court with a minimalist jurisprudence that was more grounded in black letter law, and more deferential to parliament and the executive. The authors use the regime politics model to allow analysis of how a court of final appeal tends to operate within the broader political system, including how it exercises judicial power and what happens when its decisions and methods run counter or challenge the governing coalition. It also enables assessment of where and how changes occur in substantive law, workload, and interactions with other branches. Ultimately, the book affirms the claims of regime politics scholarship that courts cannot stray for long from the dominant political regime’s values and commitments, lest the regime invoke its tools to bring compliance.