A lot of Western democracies are parliamentary, which eliminates the need for a powerful Supreme Court like in the US since there shouldn’t be any fighting between the executive and the legislature.
The US also practices common law instead of civil law, again giving more power to judges as common law relies a lot more on precedent and interpreting the law.
Shocking, one of the few democracies that empowers its judges to the level of the US is Iran.
What’s the difference between common and civil law? Never heard that
As a very rough description, civil law is a legal structure where the written legal codes take complete supremacy over any case law. Legal precedent has little value and, in many cases, can’t be used as part of a legal argument. Judges have relatively little power in the interpretation of the law.
Common law, in contrast, is based on a series of previous legal decisions which can end up having the same affect as law. Previous rulings can carry the same weight as law, especially when laws are vague and need clarification.
Most of the countries that follow common law today were remnants of the British Empire. While civil law in its modern form came from Napoleonic France and its codification of Roman Law into the Napoleonic Code, other countries continued the practice and modified the code based on internal practices.
The only other major legal system in the world is Islamic law, which is its own thing.
How vulnerable
More than you would think.
While the most systems are built more robust than the Us one, it is still a sad fact that fascism / totalitarism is on the rise in many countries currently. Even robust systems are vulnerable.
Italy has been in the hands of one man recently who owned all the press and the better part of the state, and he transformed it into a puppet show. He is gone but the country is still suffering.
Austria was on the brink only a few years ago. One man had nearly owned the 3 powers legislature, executive and judiciary. Only a strong scandal in the press has saved the country.
I don’t know that much about the process of selecting the court or corrupting it, but in Australia in the last little while we’ve had three whistleblowers tried in our supreme court.
One was exposing the government illegally spying on East Timorese diplomats to gain bargaining power. The trial was held in secret because of “national security concerns”. The accused was only known as Witness K, and he managed to avoid jail time.
Richard Boyle exposed abusive practices by our welfare and tax offices to illegally share information in a “robodebt” scheme that fraudulently sent poor people crushing amounts of debt. A lot of people committed suicide as a result. He may go to prison for a long time. (Edit: he’s facing up to 46 years,
and it seems the robodebt scandal was separate, but the ATO was part of that as wellEDIT 2: It was in fact about robodebt and the predatory culture in the ATO that spurred it)David McBride exposed war crimes by Australian special forces in Afghanistan and was given six years jail time. His identity was exposed when our previous right wing government raided our national journalists’ offices and stole documents regarding their investigation into the war crimes.
Our current nominally-leftist government could have stopped the last two of these prosecutions at any time and they just let them continue.
Oh and of the three incidents, only the whistleblowers were prosecuted. None of the people doing the crimes have been charged with anything.
Our government and its courts have made their priorities extremely clear: snitches get stitches.
While the USA is a relatively young country, it’s oddly one of the oldest democracies.
I believe most other democracies have better-written laws and better checks and balances because, in part, of mistakes the founders made when writing the US constitution (which was always a highly imperfect compromise, allowed for slavery, and had to be ammended several times just to patch it up).
Hopefully someone more knowledgeable will chime in. But I think the shitshow we call the SCOTUS is somewhat unique.
one of the oldest democracies.
The Greek cities want to have a word with you.
Which is why I said “one of”. Keep calm and pedant on.
