Judicial Review: A Comparative Study between USA, UK and India

Indian democracy is based on the concept of supremacy of law. Law is considered to be the superior authority, and at the top of all lies the grundnorm, that is, the Constitution of India. It is the Indian Constitution from which every other law flows. No law and even no action of the bodies of this democracy, i.e., the Legislature, the Executive and the Judiciary, can go against what the spirit of the Constitution has to offer. Here, the role of the judiciary comes into play to maintain a system of checks and balances to ensure that no arbitrary action is given way under the garb of powers provided to these organs respectively. Though judicial review has not been expressly used in the Constitution, its presence can be seen in various laws and even before when the Constitution came into the picture. Not only in India but also in the United States of America, judicial review has been present impliedly. But on the other hand, judicial review is not a well-recognized concept in the United Kingdom, where the system is based on the concept of Parliamentary sovereignty and legislative supremacy. In this paper, the author intends to throw some light upon the concept of judicial review and intends to make a comparative analysis of the concept between India, the USA and the UK.