Revista da EMERJ - V. 21 - N. 3 - Setembro/Dezembro - 2019 - Tomo 1

55  R. EMERJ, Rio de Janeiro, v. 21, n. 3, t. 1, p. 55-71, set.-dez., 2019  TOMO 1 Constitutions, Constitutional Courts and Constitutional Interpretation at the Interface of Law and Politics Dieter Grimm Before the end of World War II constitutional courts or courts with constitutional jurisdiction were a rarity. Although constitutions had been in place long before, a worldwide demand for constitutional adjudication arose only after the experiences with the many totalitarian systems of the 20 th century. The post-totalitarian constitutional assemblies regarded judicial review as the logical consequence of constitutionalism. In a remarkable judgment, the Israeli Supreme Court said in 1995: “Judicial review is the soul of the constitution itself. Strip the constitution of judicial review and you have removed its very life… It is therefore no wonder that judicial review is now developing. The majority of enlightened democratic states have judicial review… The Twentieth Century is the century of judicial review”. 1 Based on this universal trend, the Israeli Court claimed the power of judicial review even though it had not been explicitly endowed with it in the constitution. So, just as the transition from absolute rule to constitutionalism had modified the relationship between law and politics, this relationship was nowmodified by the establishment of constitutional courts. As long as law was regarded as being of divine origin, politics were subordinate to law. Political power derived its authority from the task to maintain and enforce divine law, and this did not include the right to make law. When the Reformation undermined the divine basis of the legal order and led to the religious civil wars of the 16 th and 17 th centuries the inversion of the traditional relationship between law and politics was regarded as a precondition for the restoration of social peace. The political 1 United Mizrahi Bank Ltd. v. Migdal Village, Civil Appeal No. 6821/93, decided 1995.