• DOI:10.1086/SCR.1975.3108812
• Corpus ID: 140742890

Constitutional Review in France

@article{Beardsley1975ConstitutionalRI,
  title={Constitutional Review in France},
  author={James E. Beardsley},
  journal={The Supreme Court Review},
  year={1975},
  volume={1975},
  pages={189 - 259}
}

• James E. Beardsley
• Published 1 January 1975
• Law, Political Science, History
• The Supreme Court Review

From the fall of the ancien regime until 4 October 1958, the French resisted every effort o subject legislation to effective constitutional restraint. The judges of both the judicial and the administrative courts refused to examine any plea founded on the unconstitutionality of an act of Parliament or, indeed, of any other manifestation of la loi. Several attempts to establish nonjudicial organs of constitutional review foundered in institutional weakness and in the political impossibility of effectively restraining imperial or parliamentary legislators. The Constitution of 4 October 1958' profoundly altered the distribution of lawmaking power in the French Republic and made some measure of effective constitutional review indispensable. By confining the legislative authority of the Parliament o certain fundamental matters and empowering the Government to make law by decree in all areas not expressly saved to Parliament, the 1958 Constitution split the lawmaking authority of the state. Encroachment by either lawmaker on the domain of the other was to be restrained by two institutions. The Conseil d'Etat, was to exercise its long-settled powers of judicial review of administrative acts. The newly created Conseil constitutionnel was empowered to determine the limits of parliamentary authority.