Judicial Referral of Constitutional Disputes in Ethiopia: From Practice to Theory

Legal systems have long known the pressure exerted by the executive or the legislative branches on their judicial counterparts in the battle for more operative legal space, or alternatively, to constrain judicial oversight of the respective activities of the other two branches of a state. Likewise, jurisdictional competitions for adjudications of constitutional issues have reached heightened proportions in some countries, due mainly to ordinary courts’ reluctance to cede cases to the stand-alone constitutional courts or other similar tribunals.