Conceptual themes in the general literature on populism

While debate continues about the best way to define and measure populism, a basic consensus has emerged around three features. First, and most fundamentally, populism involves a claim by leaders to represent the ‘pure people’ against the ‘corrupt elite’ (Müller Reference Muller2016; Mudde Reference Mudde and Kaltwasser2017; Brubaker Reference Brubaker2017). Populists paint establishment actors as insular and self-serving, and themselves as the singular legitimate figures in touch with and able to respond to the popular will. Second, and relatedly, in the name of responsiveness to “the people,” populist leaders often work around, defy, capture, or replace established procedures and institutional structures (Urbinati Reference Urbinati2015; Weyland Reference Weyland2001; Isacharoff Reference Issacharoff2023; Corrales Reference Corrales2024). They pursue unmediated communication with and connection to the general public, frequently in a personalist manner. Third, populists strive to demonstrate their connection to and affinity with ordinary people (Jagers and Walgrave Reference Jagers and Walgrave2007; Ostiguy Reference Ostiguy, Cristobal, Taggart, Espejo and Ostiguy2017; Kuo Reference Kuo2019) by including and integrating them in their communications and/or their actions (Corrales Reference Corrales2024), often in ways that transgress social and political norms (Moffitt Reference Moffitt2016; Oliver and Rahn Reference Oliver and Rahn2016; Ostiguy Reference Ostiguy, Cristobal, Taggart, Espejo and Ostiguy2017). As Javier Corrales notes, populism has a core theme, which is a binary antagonism of the people versus the corrupt elite, coupled with an “anti-institutional streak,” but its specific content varies across time and space, as populists “mix and match” their framing of the people, the elites, and the nature of the threats that the latter pose to the former (2024, 1812). Populism is thus, at best, a “thin-centered ideology” (Mudde and Kaltwasser Reference Mudde and Kaltwasser2017, 6), defined more by its general form than by a specific content. It is “more about a claim to authority and an approach to governance than it is about particular policies” (Hilbink, Reference Hilbink2026, 53).

Several analysts have focused on the way that populists assert claims to legitimacy based on a relationship to the people that is distinct from and at odds with party-based representative democracy, comparing and contrasting these with claims made by technocratic leaders (Müller Reference Muller2016; Carmani Reference Caramani2017; Kosař, Baroš, and Dufek Reference Kosař, Baroš and Dufek2019). Both populists and technocrats position themselves as “above” politics, rejecting political disagreement as obstructive and dismissing the value of horizontal exchange between competing parties or between different institutional actors (see Hilbink, Reference Hilbink2026, 54). Technocrats do this by claiming that their expertise makes them better, more responsible policymakers, able to do what’s best for the society without the messiness and delays of political processes, while populists claim to have a superior understanding of the “will of the people,” to which they can be uniquely and immediately responsive, especially if they can bypass rules and procedures that might slow or check the pursuit of popular policies (Caramani Reference Caramani2017, 62). Moffitt (Reference Moffitt2016) and Ostiguy (Reference Ostiguy, Cristobal, Taggart, Espejo and Ostiguy2017), for their part, conceive of technocracy and populism at the opposite ends of a continuum of political performance or style, running from formal, impersonal, “rational-legal” models of authority to personalistic, immediate, and “charismatic” forms (Ostiguy Reference Ostiguy, Cristobal, Taggart, Espejo and Ostiguy2017, 82).

This joint consideration of technocracy and populism is particularly useful for a project focused on judges, whose traditional role and basis for authority is highly technocratic. Indeed, one of the motivations for this project was to grapple with reconciling the traditional image of the judge as an elite state actor that works in removed chambers, follows and enforces strict procedural rules, and issues judgments that rely on formal, technical reasoning, with the image of the populist as a charismatic, plain-speaking, anti elite figure that challenges or outright dispenses with established procedural rules, directly communicating with and mobilizing support from large segments of the public.

Contributors’ definitions of judicial populism

What, then, are the definitions of judicial populism that emerge from the contributions to this symposium? In the analyses of the particular cases they study (India, Italy, and Pakistan), Bhuwania, Kureshi, and Manzi, respectively, describe judicial behavior that departs, sometimes radically, from traditional technocratic norms and expectations.

Anuj Bhuwania, building on (and back from) his 2017 book, Courting the People, focuses on the Indian Supreme Court, whose populist behavior he summarizes as two-pronged: a celebration of informalism to facilitate access to justice combined with an embrace of constitutional directive principles to advance a “substantivization of social justice” (Bhuwania, Reference Bhuwania2026, 35). This has consisted not only of actively populist conduct, such as a regular “invocation of the people” to justify both procedural innovations (like Public Interest Litigation, or PIL) and improvisations in substantive law, such as an expansive interpretation of the right to life, but also a “pivot” from a counter-majoritarian role and check on government lawlessness (Bhuwania, Reference Bhuwania2026, 21). In other words, Bhuwania suggests judicial populism should be defined both by what judges do and do not do, emphasizing how the embrace of a more direct policy making or vertical accountability role by Indian high court judges went hand in hand with an abdication of a horizontal accountability role (O’Donnell Reference O’Donnell, Schedler, Diamond and Marc1999).

Yasser Kureshi traces a similar pattern in his analysis of the behavior of the Pakistani Supreme Court from (approximately) 2008 to 2018. Beginning under military rule in the early 2000s, Pakistani high court judges began “seeking to champion the public interest,” often “bypass[ing] formal legal language and procedures” (Kureshi, Reference Kureshi2026, 80). Their populist repertoire, reminiscent of that of their Indian counterparts, included the relaxation of barriers to public access to courts; the restructuring of proceedings to facilitate unmediated access to judges; the invitation of media coverage for direct communication with public; the interpretation of the Constitution as embodying the will of the people; and the use of simplified language, invoking the interests of the general public rather than using the esoteric vocabulary of constitutional interpretation and legal precedent (Kureshi, Reference Kureshi2026, 83). As Kureshi explains, Pakistan’s populist judges effectively repurposed judicial review as a tool of vertical rather than horizontal accountability, seeking to “hold [] the executive and legislature accountable to the people, rather than to the law” (Kureshi, Reference Kureshi2026, 85).

In the Italian case, Lucia Manzi identifies two closely connected aspects of the Mani Pulite campaign that qualify it as an example of judicial populism. First is the moralistic legal interpretation via which prosecutors, who conceived themselves as stewards of the will of the “virtuous” people, bent the law and innovated in the fight against an “undefined conglomerate” of corrupt elites (Manzi, Reference Manzi2026, 116). Second is their direct communication with and appeals to the public through the media, which rallied popular opinion in their favor and thereby protected their work from interference from inside and outside the judiciary. Notably, this also involved bending procedural rules such as mandatory confidentiality (Manzi, Reference Manzi2026, 128). As in the Indian and Pakistani cases, Manzi describes a variation on the central populist theme of judges presenting themselves as the true defenders of the people (rather than of the law) and, in order to speak directly to and work for the people, relaxing and/or providing innovative interpretations of established rules.

In contrast to these three case studies, Lisa Hilbink takes a deductive approach, developing a conceptual schema that might potentially apply to any judges (including prosecutors/ investigating judges), chambers, or courts. To do so, she draws on both the general literature on populism and that on judicial activism. She makes the case that judicial populism is not simply a more aggressive form of judicial activism, but, rather, is analytically distinct from and orthogonal to judicial activism. Whereas judicial activism describes the degree to which judicial decisions involve creativity and an assertion of interpretive supremacy (as opposed to restraint and deference), Hilbink argues that judicial populism captures the extent to which judges present themselves and their work in ways proximate and oriented to ordinary people (rather than as removed and technical). In other words, for Hilbink, judicial populism is not about what judges decide per se but about how they present their decisions and perform their role. Engaging the claim that technocracy and populism constitute opposite poles of a continuum (Moffitt Reference Moffitt2016, Carmani Reference Caramani2017, Ostiguy Reference Ostiguy, Cristobal, Taggart, Espejo and Ostiguy2017), and noting that populism, like activism, is gradational rather than categorical. Hilbink proposes a set of criteria that could be used to code judicial behavior for both activism and populism, respectively (see Tables 1 and 2 at Hilbink, Reference Hilbink2026, pp. 57–59). Based on such coding, Hilbink contends that analysts could plot judges, decisions, chambers, or courts on a grid matrix, with judicial activism on the X axis and judicial populism on the Y axis (Hilbink, Reference Hilbink2026, 56).

Hilbink organizes her proposed indicators of judicial populism (vs. technocracy) into six performance elements: “the type of legitimacy claim advanced; the explicit audience addressed; the spotlighting (or not) of individual actors (judges); the stage(s) or venues on/through which judges speak; whether they follow a method of sticking closely to the formal procedural script or improvising therefrom; and the tone or tenor of their decisions or off-the-bench statements or actions” (Hilbink, Reference Hilbink2026, p. 58). Accordingly, judicial behavior would move up the scale of populism when it involves one or more of the following features: (1) judges explicitly assert a legitimacy claim of responsiveness to popular needs or interests, especially that judges are filling a void that elected representatives are failing to address; (2) the audience addressed is the public, via an invocation of and/or appeal to the people, the citizenry, common folk, etc.; (3) judges act and speak in personalist terms, putting one or more particular judges in the public spotlight; (4) decisions or statements are issued off the bench, in the public square (physical or digital); (5) judges deviate from procedural norms and protocols in an attempt to engage or serve litigants, defendants, or the public in more direct and unmediated ways (often informal, may even be transgressive); (6) the tone used is political, provocative, vanguardist, openly connecting judges and their work to a more general political project; this may involve the portrayal of judges as dedicated, even unique, champions of the people, rather than guardians of the law (Hilbink, Reference Hilbink2026, Table 2, p. 59).

The judges and decisions/behaviors discussed by Bhuwania, Manzi, and Kureshi in their respective case studies would undoubtedly plot high on the Y axis (of judicial populism) and likely quite far to the right on the X axis (of judicial activism), placing them solidly in the upper right quadrant of Hilbink’s proposed grid. However, the utility of Hilbink’s framework is not so much that it allows for specifying the nature of the conduct of any individual judge or court in absolute terms, but rather that it enables analysts to distinguish between, compare, and evaluate judicial behaviors relative to each other and (potentially) across time. As she states, “Refined and applied systematically to a set of judges or decisions [under the same basic set of legal texts and institutional rules], [this schema] can facilitate comparisons and reveal distinctions and variations that might be obscured by a categorical and unidimensional assessment of judicial behavior” (Hilbink, Reference Hilbink2026, 63).

Conceptual reflections

All four of this symposium’s contributors draw productively on the broader populism literature to elaborate their respective definitions and accounts of judicial populism, and Hilbink offers an argument about how and why we can distinguish between judicial populism and judicial activism. But what broader conceptual insights do the articles offer regarding judicial behavior, on the one hand, and populism, on the other? And what conceptual questions do they generate or leave unaddressed?

Regarding judicial behavior, one important point to note is that all four authors refer to both on-bench and off-bench behaviors as part of their accounts of judicial populism. This has implications for the comparative study of judicial behavior, reinforcing the idea that to understand and distinguish between the roles that judges can and do play in different times and places, it is important to go beyond the analysis of judicial decisions (Hilbink Reference Hilbink, Halliday, Karpik and Feeley2007; Trochev and Ellet, Reference Trochev and Ellett2014; Bakiner, Reference Bakiner2016; Ingram Reference Ingram2015; Dressel, Sánchez-Urribarri, and Stroh Reference Dressel, Sanchez-Urribarri and Stroh2017). Indeed, in an era of ever-increasing political spectacle (Debord Reference Debord1967; Briziarelli and Armano Reference Briziarelli and Armano2017), analysts should be attentive to the varied ways that judges communicate with and perform for different audiences. This, of course, poses certain methodological challenges, given that it requires deciding what counts as data and how that data should be collected and analyzed. A related matter is specifying the unit of analysis: individual judges vs. collegial courts, single cases/decisions/trials vs. broad patterns across time, etc. There is no single correct response to these challenges, but what is certain is that addressing them requires multi-disciplinary dialogue, opening exciting opportunities for collaboration within the socio-legal field.

Meanwhile, this symposium makes an important contribution to the broader literature on populism by driving home the parallels between technocracy and populism and the tensions between each of them, respectively, and competitive party democracy. Our contributors demonstrate how quintessentially technocratic actors, such as judges, can repackage their status as political “outsiders,” separate from and beyond particular partisan or factional loyalties, with a duty to serve as guardians and interpreters of the state’s unifying charter (the constitution), and repurpose it to the task of realizing what they understand and present as the general interests of the people. This helps to make clear that, while populism may be presented or understood as an antidote to overly technocratic rule (Mounk Reference Mounk2018; Pin Reference Pin2019), both share a similar distrust of pluralist politics and a preference for a paternalistic approach to governance (Caramani Reference Caramani2017), asking the people to put their faith in either a technocratic elite or a populist savior.

Themes in the Empirical Literature on Electoral Populism

The rich scholarship on electoral populism highlights how a range of political and economic conditions including political corruption, globalization, post industrialization and rising economic inequality and insecurity have increased the appeal of populist leaders seeking to disrupt entrenched political systems (Betz Reference Betz1994; Kreisi Reference Kreisi2014; de la Torre Reference Torre2010; Hawkins et al. Reference Hawkins, Read, Pauwels, Kaltwasser, Taggart, Espejo and Ostiguy2017; Iversen and Soskice Reference Iversen and Soskice2019; Diamond Reference Diamond2021; Mounk Reference Mounk2018; Gerschewski Reference Gerschewski2021; Berman Reference Berman2021). Scholars studying the institutional conditions facilitating the rise of populism have highlighted the inability of political institutions to effectively respond to public grievances, and a growing dissatisfaction with mainstream political institutions that are perceived as corrupt, unresponsive or “feckless” (Berman Reference Berman2021; Corrales Reference Corrales2024). Growing public discontent and disenchantment do not necessarily lead to increased support for populists, though; populist actors themselves must consider how to capitalize on these public sentiments, directing them against the established political system and incumbent political elites, and in favor of their own political platform and agenda. Voluntarist explanations hold that what matters is how the actions and rhetoric of populist leaders and their supporters give salience to socio-economic grievances or to frustrations with the corruption and unresponsiveness of mainstream political parties, making members of the polity who have been overlooked, excluded, or taken for granted feel seen and heard (Kenny Reference Kenny2017; De Vries and Hobolt Reference Vries, Catherine and Hobolt2020; Berman Reference Berman2021).

Contributors’ Findings on the Conditions Facilitating Judicial Populism

Unlike executives or legislators, judges are not elected and therefore do not respond to the same constituencies and audiences, nor are they outsiders to the state. Therefore, to understand the conditions in which populist judges are likely to emerge, we must consider how judges are i) both products of, and attentive to, specific constituencies, and ii) shaped by their own professional experience working within the state and with its legal and constitutional frameworks. The three case-focused articles in this symposium suggest that political turbulence, social mobilization, and legal contradictions are key factors that impact judges’ professional experiences and relationships with constituencies and other state institutions. In turn, these shape judges’ understanding of any deficit in legitimate popular representation, whether in the political system or the judiciary itself, and the strategies they can and should use in response to that deficit.

Manzi, Bhuwania, and Kureshi all highlight how political turbulence can shape the professional experience of judges, directly as state officers caught up in that turbulence and/or via the grievances of the constituencies in society that are the key audiences for the judiciary. Manzi explains how, in Italy, the tumultuous post war years that prosecutors spent on the front lines confronting and prosecuting far-left terror organizations contributed to a reconceptualization of their role as judicial officers, from mechanically implementing the written law to innovating legal tools and strategies in order to tackle major socio-political issues such as systemic corruption. In India, Bhuwania describes how Indira Gandhi defanged the judiciary that had opposed her polarizing political agenda, on the pretext that the judiciary was elitist and standing in the way of social transformation. After Gandhi’s short-lived period of Emergency rule, the judiciary sought to reclaim legitimacy and relevance by adopting procedural flexibility in order to expand access to justice and participate in socio-economic transformation. In Pakistan, Kureshi explains how, during the era of dissonant politics of the 1980s and 1990s featuring fluctuations between military and civilian rule and confrontations between civilian and military centers of power, lawyers and judges became wary of both the dangers of unfettered military rule and the allegations of factionalism and corruption that plagued elected governments and political parties. This convinced lawyers in Pakistan’s bar, from which Pakistan’s high court judges were mostly recruited, that only the judiciary could rescue the people from dysfunction and corruption.

Manzi and Kureshi also highlight how increased engagement between judicial officers and mobilized sections of civil society can motivate judges to align with these organizations and adopt the popular causes around which these organizations mobilize. In Italy, Manzi highlights how increasing interactions between legal professionals and a resurgence of civil society organizations agitating against entrenched and corrupt elites motivated judges to adopt a populist repertoire, aligning themselves with civil society actors to combat corruption. In Pakistan’s hybrid regime, the middle-class bar associations were the social and professional networks within which judges were embedded and thus the key constituency and audience for the judiciary. The bar mobilized to celebrate judges who adopted a confrontational and anti elitist approach to law and litigation, to name and shame judges who were seen as collaborators, and to support confrontational judges when they faced backlash from Pakistan’s authoritarian executive. Judges, responding to these audiences, adopted a more populist repertoire in their jurisprudence.

In addition to the respective features of the political and social context, both Bhuwania and Kureshi highlight tensions built into constitutional frameworks that shaped judges’ expectations and understanding of their role in the political system and provided them with the tools to expand their domain beyond safeguarding horizontal accountability to the law to also ensuring vertical accountability to the people. In the Indian case, Bhuwania explains how both the transformative aspirations for state power in constitutionalized directive principles and limits on state power in constitutionalized fundamental rights co-exist uncomfortably in India’s constitutional law and jurisprudence. He explains that the directive principles enabled judges to justify their moves to steer state governance and policy from the mid-1970s forward. For Pakistan, Kureshi describes the dissonance creating by both the viceregal and representative models being embedded in Pakistan’s constitutional framework, which exacerbated conflict between Pakistan’s elected and military centers of power, engaged the judiciary in resolving major political disputes generated by these constitutional tensions, and gave judges a set of constitutional tools to supervise and regulate the actions of Pakistan’s political branches.

In sum, the scholars in this symposium suggest that populist judges emerge when key audiences connected to the judiciary, whether in judicial recruitment networks or civil society organizations, lose faith in the quality of representation and justice provided by established political and constitutional institutions, and the constitutional and legal framework generates expectations and opportunities for judges to go beyond their traditional roles.

Reflections on the Causes of Judicial Populism

Our contributors’ insights on the conditions facilitating populism highlight common themes that permeate the general study of populism. Inside and outside the electoral sphere, populists all offer a critique of established institutions and the elites that inhabit or benefit from these institutions, be they party systems, representative legislatures, or legal procedures. The critique that these institutions subvert the will or interests of the people is common to all populists, electoral or judicial, but the institutional critique provided depends upon the audience populists are engaged with and to which they respond. If electoral populists craft their critique of how established institutions are failing the “people” based on the grievances of the electoral majority whose support they seek, populist judges construct their critique of how established institutions fail the ‘people’ based on the grievances of the more specific audiences with whom judges interact, through their social and professional networks and civil society engagement.

This has two implications. First, it is entirely possible that variants of populism emerge in different institutional settings within the same political system, generating a scenario that Khosla (Reference Khosla, Jackson and Khosla2025) describes as competing populisms. Second, different populists may learn from and respond to each other. If in India, judicial populists took a page from Gandhi’s populist playbook and institutional critique (Bhuwania), in Italy, Berlusconi built on the populist critique of systemic political corruption that had been articulated by the judicial populists in the Mani Pulite operation (Broder Reference Broder2020).

In terms of judicial behavior, our contributors highlight that judges are part of broader dynamic processes in which they do not just respond to political opportunities or constraints/risks, but “play an active, conscious role in the reproduction” and transformation of “institutions through discourse and ideas” (Huneeus, Couso, and Sieder Reference Couso, Huneeus, Sieder, Couso, Hunneus and Sieder2010, 13). The populist repertoire, as we see in India, Pakistan, and Italy, is not just strategically deployed by judges when the political conditions are appropriate, but is borne out of broader processes of socio-political conflict and transformation that generate new ideas and discourses which sweep judges up and shape how they respond to the legal frameworks they work with, the institution they work in, and state-society relations more broadly. As long as judges wield enough institutional independence such that they are not simply agents of the ruling regime, judicial behavior will be shaped and animated by ideas and discourses that emerge through the interactions between judges and their constituencies and exposure to broader processes of socio-political change.

Contributors’ Insights on the Implications of Judicial Populism for Democracy

Theorists of constitutional democracy hold that independent and empowered courts ensure horizontal accountability in political systems, regulating the constitutionally prescribed exercise of power by other government office holders, and checking potential majoritarian excesses of the elected leaders (Ely Reference Ely1980; O’Donnell Reference O’Donnell, Schedler, Diamond and Marc1999; Guarnieri Reference Guarnieri and Przeworksi2003). To do so, they traditionally cloak their decisions in the language of legal expertise and impartial enforcement of legal principles and procedures, presenting themselves as guardians of the constitution. As our contributors show, populist judges move away from this mode, defining and justifying their role more in terms of responsiveness to the people, and consciously deviating from institutional norms of judicial behavior. Our contributors weigh in on the risks that these populist disruptions of professional norms and practices may have for democracy.

To begin, Hilbink suggests that the conceptual schema she develops might be useful in specifying and clarifying not only different gradations of judicial populism and their relationship to judicial activism, but also in facilitating a normative assessment of different instances of judicial behavior. She underscores that when judges operate and present themselves in a maximally technocratic mode, they can end up appearing, if not being, tone deaf to the litigants that come before them and the wider publics that they are sworn to serve (Hilbink, Reference Hilbink2026, 59). Thus, to the extent that, through adopting some elements of a populist repertoire, judges descend from their pedestals and communicate their decisions and their role in ways that are more accessible to ordinary people (moving to the center of the grid Hilbink proposes), judicial populism may be democracy enhancing, improving the representativeness and legitimacy of the system (Hilbink Reference Hilbink2019). However, when judges throw technocratic norms to the wind, portraying themselves as better able to represent the public than are elected officials and playing fast and loose with procedural norms and protocols, then judicial populism might threaten democracy–at least democracy understood in diachronic, deliberative, and pluralist terms. In such a democracy, judges should seek to “engage differently situated people and institutional actors in dialog” (Hilbink, Reference Hilbink2026, 69), not to act as justice crusaders, uniquely capable of and dedicated to responding to the public interest. Not only does such extreme judicial populism undermine the basic structure and logic of representative democracy, but it also opens judges up to charges of impropriety and may invite backlash.

The three empirical case studies in our symposium illustrate both benefits and risks of judicial populism in three very different political contexts. In 1990s Italy, for example, Manzi suggests that the populist approach enhanced the effectiveness of the judicial system in dealing with the democratic dysfunction generated by systemic political corruption. The kickbacks and embezzlement that had permeated Italy’s political system for decades had been impossible to address due to the political capture of state agencies. It took a populist legal and communication strategy to help the judiciary successfully prosecute corrupt officials without facing political backlash. In other words, the populism of Italian investigating judges served as a corrective disruption, enabling them to provide the horizontal accountability that a more conventional, technocratic approach could not. However, as analysts such as David Broder (Reference Broder2020) contend, this success ultimately didn’t shore up the health of democracy in Italy; rather, the downfall of the postwar political parties brought about through the Clean Hands campaign created an organizational vacuum and a generalized disillusionment with politics that has allowed rightwing populism to flourish.Footnote ¹

Through a longitudinal analysis of the Pakistani case, Kureshi highlights that the disruptive impact of judicial populism can have mixed consequences depending upon the nature of the system being disrupted. When judges assume a representative role in the political system, confronting and holding other branches accountable to the will of the people, and encroaching on the domains of the political branches based on this presumed representative role and popular support, this triggers inter-institutional confrontations. When populist judges assert that other branches of government are corrupt and unrepresentative, the very charge of unrepresentativeness and obstruction of the public interest can be lobbed back at unelected judges from the political branches of the government. If judges are competing with politicians and other elite stakeholders over who is the more credible representative of the people, this can lead to confrontations between the judiciary and other state institutions and put pressure on the democratic system. When populist judges pursue popular accountability in a military dictatorship, where democratic channels of representation have necessarily been blocked, this disruption can help facilitate greater democratization of the political system, as it did in Pakistan in 2007. However, Kureshi also suggests that when the same populist approach was adopted against elected political institutions after 2008, the Court clashed with, undermined, and delegitimized elected branches of government, and later faced backlash itself. Thus, Kureshi suggests that the institutional competition over popular representation and legitimacy, generated by populist judges, is fraught with risks for democratic stability.

Finally, Bhuwania contends that judicial populism has contributed to the erosion of constitutional democracy in contemporary India through what he labels “sins of commission” and a major “sin of omission.” The sins of commission consist of the “dramatic” expansion of the scope of justiciability to give judges a central role in the pursuit of the objectives articulated in the constitution’s Directive Principles. In what Bhuwania characterizes as a determination to win “the tournament of competitive radicalism” with elected officials (Bhuwania, Reference Bhuwania2026, p. 35), India’s populist judges have engaged in “flamboyant excesses” that have had an “increasingly…tenuous relation with law itself” (Bhuwania, Reference Bhuwania2026, p. 21). This behavior has gone hand in hand, he argues, with the “decline of the counter-majoritarian constitutional imagination” (p. 21), producing a crucial sin of omission: the abandonment of the duty to check government violations of liberal rights (such as bodily integrity, privacy, and due process). In Bhuwania’s estimation, the Indian High Court’s normative role has become “chief cheerleader of the state agenda” (p. 22), rendering it unequipped and disinclined to challenge government tyranny. In short, judicial populism has suffocated judicial review in India, a situation of particular concern under the majoritarian Hindu nationalist government.

Taken together, then, the contributions to this symposium demonstrate that judicial populism, like electoral populism, may enhance the perception of and support for assertive behavior, strengthening the effectiveness thereof, at least in the short term. However, when the populist repertoire eclipses the technocratic norms and practices that anchor and orient the judiciary in a constitutional democracy, such that courts function more as agents of vertical rather than horizontal accountability, populist judges may unwittingly contribute to democratic erosion.