The ghost of the results-oriented constitutional review

This piece challenges the claim that “results-oriented” judicial decision-making is universally condemned by theory and comparative constitutional scholarship. It argues that important work in judicial psychology and legal theory shows that intuitive or outcome-influenced reasoning is neither uniformly rejected nor necessarily incompatible with judicial independence and impartiality. Consequently, the critique of results-oriented reasoning rests on conceptual misunderstandings about judicial cognitive processes and the institutional safeguards that constrain judicial behaviour.