Rock Bottom

Thomas Nagel

• The Dignity of Legislation by Jeremy Waldron
  Cambridge, 210 pp, £35.00, July 1999, ISBN 0 521 65092 5

This short, assertive and engaging book has a chip on its shoulder, hence the title. In the academic culture of legal theory that Waldron partly inhabits, legislatures come in for a lot of distrust or even contempt, by comparison with courts. Courts are widely thought to arrive at their results by reasoning, whereas legislatures are thought to operate by the crude clash of partisan interests. In the United States there is substantial support for the role of courts in guarding individual rights from the depredations of legislative majorities that would otherwise trample them underfoot: this is the famous institution of judicial review, whereby laws passed by Congress or the state legislatures can be struck down as unconstitutional if they violate certain individual rights – to personal freedom as in the case of abortion, or to equal treatment in the case of racial segregation. Britain, too, may soon acquire some version of this system, in the form of a Bill of Rights.