The lure and the limits of dialogue

Over the last two decades, the metaphor of ‘dialogue’ has become a common way of characterizing the relationship between courts and legislatures under bills of rights. Following an examination of the role of ‘dialogue’ in debates about the Canadian Charter and the UK Human Rights Act, this article will argue that dialogue is a misleading metaphor, which we should abandon in our constitutional discourse. While it may have contributed some potential insights, its overall effect has been to distort our understanding of the relationship between courts and legislatures under bills of rights. In the scholarly debates surrounding dialogue, the lure of the metaphor obscured its limits. This article examines some of the pathologies which afflicted the debate about dialogue in comparative constitutional discourse, detailing some of the many distortions of dialogue.