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This chapter argues that the state should use judicial review to constrain democracy. It identifies several rights that individuals possess, and then defends judicial review as a mechanism for protecting these rights. The chapter then considers the objection that judicial review is undemocratic because it constrains the laws that an electorate or their representatives might adopt. To explore this idea, it distinguishes two arguments in defence of democracy. The first holds that democracy is valuable because it produces good outcomes, and the second holds that democracy is valuable because it treats each member of a society equally when they disagree about which outcomes are good.

This chapter investigates how-and how effectively-international law strikes a balance between the individual and collective rights of people, and the prerogatives of sovereign states. It begins by exploring the what, who, and where of self-determination. Self-determination is a concept that has meant different things to different people at different times. Its meaning under international law can only be understood in relation to the shifting paradigms of international politics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The chapter discusses the Wilsonian principle of self-determination and its partial application during the interwar period. It then turns to the post-Second World War rebirth of self-determination as a right of colonized peoples to independent statehood. The chapter also considers the concept of internal self-determination, before analysing what external self-determination has come to mean in non-colonial contexts and the problem of remedial secession. Finally, it examines the law and politics of recognition of statehood.