The paper confronts some of the arguments presented by Jeremy Waldron against the mechanism of judicial review and tries to provide a modest contribution for supporting the legitimacy of Courts as an adequate institutional setting to adjudicate human rights within contemporary democratic systems. The first part presents the twofold framework of my position, i.e, the particular open structure and expansive scope that human rights have acquired in the international field, and Rainer Forst’s theory about the foundations of this kind of rights. The second one describes a limited piece of Jeremy Waldron’s “core case” against judicial review, focusing on the reasons he provides to discard the specific moral insight of courts in this area of rights’ adjudication as an outcome-related advantage that can support the mechanism of judicial review. Finally, the paper develops a critique of Waldron’s position regarding that advantage. Without contesting his four demanding assumptions about how democratic institutions work in an ideal context, I argue that the specific moral insight that Courts have as a consequence of how individual cases are presented before them is a strong advantage over legislatures and can be dispositive
in the case for judicial review in this field of law if we think about it from within
the empirical and theoretical framework described in the first part of the work.