Constitutional Statecraft in Asian Courts
ISBN: 9780191785535
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Constitutional and Administrative Law;

Constitutional Statecraft in Asian Courts explores how courts engage in constitutional state-building in aspiring, yet deeply fragile, democracies in Asia. Yvonne Tew offers an in-depth look at contemporary Malaysia and Singapore, explaining how courts protect and construct constitutionalism even as they confront dominant political parties and negotiate democratic transitions.

This richly illustrative account offers at once an engaging analysis of Southeast Asia's constitutional context, as well as a broader narrative that should resonate in many countries across Asia that are also grappling with similar challenges of colonial legacies, histories of authoritarian rule, and societies polarized by race, religion, and identity.

The book explores the judicial strategies used for statecraft in Asian courts, including an analysis of the specific mechanisms that courts can use to entrench constitutional basic structures and to protect rights in a manner that is purposive and proportionate. Tew's account shows how courts in Asia's emerging democracies can chart a path forward to help safeguard a nation's constitutional core and to build an enduring constitutional framework.


Yvonne Tew, Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center

Yvonne Tew is an Associate Professor at Georgetown University Law Center, with expertise in constitutional law, comparative constitutional law, and comparative law and religion. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar, and a Master of Laws from Harvard Law School. She received her first law degree from the University of Cambridge. Before joining the faculty at Georgetown Law, she was an Associate-in-Law Postdoctoral Research Scholar at Columbia Law School and a Hauser Global Fellow at the New York University School of Law.

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