LAUSR

zens’ rights to political and legal contestation.”This requirement is met when institutions are in place that “enable citizens to challenge the acceptability of coercive policies to which they are subject... by requesting that proper public reasons be provided in their support” (p. 187). In the book’s two closing chapters, it emerges that Lafont ascribes the most important role to citizens’ right to legal contestation, understood as the right to initiate legal challenges to the constitutionality of any policy or legal statute. By exercising this right, says Lafont, citizens can open or reopen a process in which “reasons and justifications aimed at showing the constitutionality of a contested policy are made publicly available” (p. 213)––which in turn can trigger principled public debates about policies or laws that can transform public opinion. So, in the end, it is the institution of judicial review that contributes most to the realization of a deliberative democracy “without shortcuts.” In fact, constitutional courts can even provide behavioral norms: democratic citizens should act like they would expect courts to act, scrutinizing and justifying laws and policies in conformity with the demands of public reason. Trenchantly argued, ambitious, and full of surprising insights, Democracy without Shortcuts is a major contribution to contemporary democratic theory by one of the best political philosophers in the world. These are arguably difficult times for anyone who endorses demanding democratic ideals, but Lafont defends them without being unduly optimistic about the capacities of citizens or the workings of representative democratic institutions. Nor does she give in to the temptation of renouncing some of her commitments as unsuited for the current era. Along the way, she manages to say something new and relevant about topics that few theorists seem willing to take on anymore, most notably procedural democracy and judicial review. All in all, the book is a fantastic achievement. I would still like to raise some questions about the central role and responsibility that Lafont ascribes to judicial review. I wonder, in particular, whether we should really entrust constitutional courts alone with doing the heavy lifting of ensuring that principled reasons for policies and laws are advanced in the public sphere. Without denying that initiating a procedure of judicial review allows citizens to “structure the public political debate in such a way that priority is given to the question of whether or not a contested statute violates some fundamental right or freedom” (p. 237), other democratic institutions and agents—especially movements or parties––may be able to perform this function, too. These may not have the decisional authority of courts, nor do they carry the aura of political independence––but they can put questions of fundamental rights or freedoms on the agenda and generate the sort of collective awareness that any public debate about constitutional fundamentals requires to get off the ground. And although the reasons they offer will be of a different kind than those courts provide, they need not be “non-public” reasons. Now, of course, Lafont does not explicitly exclude any of this, although she argues that political parties’ ideological “predictability,” which she contrasts to the independence of judges, is potentially detrimental to the “constitutionalization” of political debate––a somewhat unexpected claim, given the predictability one has come to expect from many courts, the ideologically divided US Supreme Court being just the most prominent example (pp. 240–41). But neither does she attend to the many ways in which more “conventional” democratic agents like movements or parties can contribute to amore deliberative public sphere. This I found surprising, not least because one of the major aims of the book is to explore the possibilities of improved macrolevel deliberation. It feels like there is something missing from the picture. Paying close attention to democratic agents and institutions other than courts seems important for at least two additional reasons. First, if it is desirable that citizens behave like they would expect courts to behave, arguably they first need to acquire the requisite reasoning skills. As Joshua Cohen, one of the pioneers of deliberative democracy, has famously noted, political organizations like movements or parties may offer inclusive spaces where citizens can engage on a regular basis in deliberative practices and become more proficient political reasoners, thus contributing in important ways to a more deliberative public sphere. Second, there exist well-functioning constitutional democracies with very weak traditions of judicial review. The Nordic countries are a case in point––and these eminently democratic states do not have defective public spheres, in which principled deliberation only rarely occurs. Rather, public justification is mainly channeled through parliaments and parties, instead of courts. Taking such alternative institutional configurations seriously seems important if one wishes to theorize from the perspective of citizens, as Lafont does. Ultimately, democratically minded citizens might interpret constitutional democracy differently, depending on their own democratic traditions. Very reasonably, they may not see public justification as intrinsically bound up with legal contestation, because other agents and institutions reliably prioritize public reasons when appropriate.