The Honourable Dyson Heydon AC QC, former Justice of the High Court of Australia and one of the common-law world’s foremost figures, considered the rise of judicial review around the world in an event at Policy Exchange.

Heydon warned that the phenomenon of rising judicial power across much of the common law world represented a “silent revolution” that had occurred largely without parliamentary sanction. Drawing on cases relating to prerogative powers and parliamentary privileges, Heydon cautioned that each individual example of judicial incursion into the political realm might seem small – but they combined to constitute a complete departure from the common law’s traditional starting point of a limited, secondary constitutional role for judges.