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Alec Stone Sweet and Jud Mathews have written an elegant, insightful, and provocative account of “the diffusion and institutionalization of proportionality as a general principle of constitutional governance, the reach of which is global” (p. 194). Proportionality analysis (“PA” in their book, and here), they argue, has developed into a “global, best-practice standard of rights protection” (p. 7). Bringing together and extending ideas from their own notable earlier work on judicial governance and on proportionality,1 their interest in this book is in the “logics” of proportionality’s global spread and of its operation as a core component of what they label as “the basic model of modern constitutional law” (p. 7).
The book’s two standout contributions are the introduction of a concept of a “system of constitutional justice,” and the elaboration of a truly global—or very nearly global—account of proportionality’s diffusion, going beyond the jurisdictions that have figured prominently in...
