In my inaugural lecture from May 2017 (introduced in Finnish here), I tried to argue for a slightly modified notion of judicial power. Section 99 of the Constitution of Finland (731/1999) seems to understand a ‘separated’ judicial power as not much more than the courts’ exclusive duty and right to ‘administer justice’, that is, to apply the law in individual cases. This deceptively clear-cut definition was recently reduplicated in Article 3 of the Courts Act (673/2016) which, in turn, makes a direct reference to the powers of the judiciary as they are defined in the Constitution. There is little about the courts’ role in the general control of the constitutionality of the activities of the political branches, although Section 106 of the Constitution did specifically create a new duty for the courts to abstain from applying primary legislation that is ‘in evident conflict’ with the constitution. The Finnish tradition of constitutional review has traditionally emphasised the role of parliamentary preview preferring a more restraint understanding of judicial power.
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