Proportionality, Judicial Review, and Global Constitutionalism

Over the past fifty years, proportionality analysis (PA) has widely diffused. It is today an overarching principle of constitutional adjudication, the preferred procedure for managing disputes involving an alleged conflict between two rights claims, or between a rights provision and a legitimate state or public interest. With the consolidation of the “new constitutionalism,”¹ this type of dispute has come to dominate the dockets of constitutional and supreme courts around the world. Although other modes of rights adjudication were available and could have been chosen and developed, PA emerged as a multi-purpose, best-practice, standard.