Judicial Review by the People Themselves: Democracy and the Rule of Law in Ancient Athens.

This article examines the practice of judicial review in ancient Athens as a case study of popular constitutionalism, where ordinary citizens exercised direct control over constitutional adjudication through the procedure known as graphe paranomon. Unlike modern democracies that rely on expert judges to check popular rule, Athens combined strong popular participation with mechanisms to constrain unrestrained majority decisions. The authors develop a formal model showing how institutional design and a societal consensus on constitutional governance helped mitigate two key threats—unpredictability and partisanship—in judicial decisions by lay jurors. The study concludes that Athens’ system enabled democratic input into constitutional review while maintaining rule of law, suggesting that extensive popular involvement in judicial processes can coexist with constitutional stability under appropriate institutional and cultural conditions.