Supreme Court decisions ‘are the beginnings of conversations between
the Court and the people and their representatives’
15
and about how
the Court ‘interacts with other institutions, with whom it is engaged in
an endlessl y renewed education conversation .. . And it is a conversation,
not a monologue.’
16
Bickel was well aware that, under the American Bill of
Rights, ‘the Court has the edge’
17
in the dialogue, but much of his work
encouraged the court to minimize full-blown constitutional decisions and
instead to use a variety of sub-constitutional devices, such as presumptions
of statutory intent and the creative use of delay, to engage ‘in a Socratic
colloquy with the other institutions of government and with society as a
whole concerning the necessity for this or that measure, for this or that
compromise.’
18
In other words, Bickel struggled, within the confines of
the American Bill of Rights, to find functional equivalents to ss. 1 and
33 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and suspended remedies. Bickel
is a founder of a modern
19
theory of dialogue between courts and legisla-
tures, and it is significant that Justice Iacobucci cited Bickel in introdu-
cing the theory of dialogue to Charter jurisprudence. Bickel also had a
substantive approach to judicial review in that he argued that courts
can, in appropriate cases, act on principles of fairness and non-discrimi-
nation that the executive and legislatures are inclined to neglect. Bickel
defended Brown v. Board of Education, but he also recognized the ability
of legislatures and society to resist that just decision.
Building on the work of Bickel, Guido Calabresi argued in 1991 that
the Canadian Charter is ‘Bickellian’ in its promotion of dialogue
between courts and legislatures.
20
Calabresi’s obs ervations were part of a
larger argum ent that American constitutionalism had been dominated
15 Alexander Bickel, The Supreme Court and the Idea of Progress (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1970) at 91 [Bickel, Progress].
16 Alexander Bickel, The Morality of Consent (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974)
at 111.
17 Bickel, Progress , supra note 15 at 91.
18 Alexander Bickel, The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court at the Bar of Politics,2d
ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985) at 70 –1 [Bickel, Least Dangerous
Branch].
19 Before Bickel, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Andrew Jackson all appealed to
the strong dialogic idea that the elected branches of government could act on their
interpretations even when they departed from the Court’s interpretation. For a
contemporary defence of this form of coordinate construction see Mark Tushnet,
Taking the Constitution Away from the Courts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1999).
20 Guido Calabresi, ‘Foreword: Antidiscrimination and Constitutional Accountability
(What the Bork Brennan Debate Avoids)’ (1991) 105 Harv.L.Rev. 80 at 124. Cass
Sunstein is another scholar who, inspired by Bickel, has argued for constitutionalism
minimalism as a device to allow increased dialogue between courts and legislatures
under the American Bill of Rights. See Cass Sunstein, One Case at a Time
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
452 UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LAW JOURNAL