In a coastal courtroom in a mid-sized European capital, an elderly woman in a blue coat stands trial for sheltering undocumented migrants. The prosecutor speaks softly but with a firmness that cuts. She violated a national security directive, he says, endangering the homeland. The defense, trembling with conviction, reminds the court of an older principle, the sanctity of human life. The judge listens, impassive. Then, with a nod that almost passes as a shrug, he hands down a sentence.
Nothing extraordinary. Nothing that will make headlines. Yet across the world, scenes like this are becoming ordinary. In places once considered guardians of liberal democracy, the judiciary is being quietly repurposed. Not by coups or manifestos, but by majoritarian consensus, where the law serves not as a shield for the minority, but as a sword for the powerful.
Judicial majoritarianism is a quiet erosion. It does not storm the gates. It rewrites procedures, appoints loyalists, reframes legal language, and subtly reinterprets precedent. It often happens behind polished doors and in well-lit courtrooms, where the veneer of rule of law remains intact, even as its soul is hollowed out.
In Hungary, the government has steadily packed courts with ideological allies, using legal mechanisms to reshape electoral laws, media oversight, and minority rights. When judges resist, retirement ages are lowered or benches are reorganized. The judiciary becomes less a check on power and more a mirror to it.
In Israel, controversial judicial reforms have prompted nationwide protests, as citizens fear the erosion of the Supreme Court’s independence under the weight of executive encroachment. The balance between democracy and theocracy, between state and individual, teeters in legal chambers once considered sacrosanct.
Even in the world’s oldest democracies, one can trace the marks. In the United States, polarizing appointments to the Supreme Court have led to landmark reversals on issues ranging from reproductive rights to environmental regulation. Public confidence in judicial impartiality is no longer taken for granted; it is contested terrain.
Then there is the world’s largest democracy. In its northern plains, a young man is sentenced for offending religious sentiments. The evidence: a meme. In another state, homes belonging to protesters are razed after an executive order, later justified as legal action. The courts remain mostly silent. Occasionally, a judge speaks up, reminding the nation that “the Constitution is a secular document.” But the voices are rare. More often, the law finds its alignment with the pulse of the crowd.
In these silences and alignments, a pattern emerges. Justice begins to lose its neutrality. The blindfold slips, not entirely, but just enough to notice who is standing in the dock. What makes judicial majoritarianism especially dangerous is that it wears the garb of legitimacy. These are not kangaroo courts or banana republic tribunals. They are institutions cloaked in legal procedure, quoting statutes and citing precedent. But beneath that surface lies the deep current of ideology—a shift from jurisprudence to preference.
This transformation is not always imposed. Often, it is welcomed. When majorities feel insecure, when national identity is framed as being under siege, and when history is rewritten to serve present anxieties, there is comfort in courts that speak their language. Judges become not arbiters of the Constitution, but custodians of sentiment. The law becomes not a path to equity but a tool of reassurance.
And yet, resistance flickers. A retired judge in Warsaw pens a letter urging his colleagues not to yield. A law student in Delhi writes a blog questioning the doctrine of “public order” being invoked too freely. A legal aid clinic in Johannesburg refuses state funding, fearing strings that may follow. These are small gestures. But they are important. Because the battle for judicial independence has never been won in a single ruling, it is a daily negotiation between power and principle.
To reclaim the courts is not merely to restore their function. It is to reassert a moral imagination where the law protects the vulnerable, not the dominant. It is to remind nations that justice does not always align with majority will, and that’s precisely the point.
In the end, what matters most is not how judges rule in times of comfort, but how they rule when the crowd demands blood. Whether they yield to the applause or stand in the way of it. Because in every nation, at every moment, the question remains the same: Is the court the last refuge of the individual or the final endorsement of the state? And when the answer begins to favor the latter, history will remember this shift by another name: the moment when ideology became law.
