Protecting the Guardians: What Brazil and Germany Teach Us About Defending Constitutional Courts against Populism

A constitutional court is built to do something almost no one else in a democracy can do: tell the majority it has gone too far. But a court has no army, and no budget of its own. Whether its rulings mean anything depends on other people choosing to honor them, including the officials who must carry them out, and, as Barry Friedman has argued, the public that those officials ultimately answer to. That dependence is the soft spot at the heart of judicial power, and populists everywhere have figured out how to press on it.