 According to democratic critics it is difficult to underestimate the considerable power which constitutional review under an entrenched charter or bill of rights places in the hands of judges who are, in modern constitutional democracies, typically unelected and hence not directly accountable to the democratic community. Despite their lack of accountability, these judges are assigned the task of providing authoritative answers to the deeply controversial questions of political morality that arise under constitutional review and with respect to which there is so much deep disagreement. Examples can range from the permissibility of abortion or physician-assisted suicide, to the banning of hate speech or the publication of violent and degrading pornography on the intenet. On the basis of these highly controversial answers they end up determining what shall be deemed lawful in the community. This is far too much political power for a small group of unelected people to wield over an entire democratic community, no matter how learned and wise they might happen to be. But perhaps more importantly, the granting of such power is fundamentally undemocratic in principle: individual citizens have, in effect, been disenfranchised by this arrangement. Each citizen of voting age should have an equal right, in a democratic society, to contribute to the creation of the laws by which she is governed. This she exercises directly via the ballot box and by whatever contributions to public discourse and debate about controversial issues she chooses to make. She also does so indirectly via the legislative votes of her elected representatives, whose task is to represent her interests and opinions. Yet with strong-form constitutional review all this has been replaced by subjection to the pronouncements of judges. The duly considered views of citizens and their representatives about the laws by which they are to be governed, arrived at (it is hoped) through fair processes of democratic decision-making, have, in effect, been set aside in favour of the contentious moral pronouncements of a handful of democratically unaccountable, elite judges. This unhappy situation is further exacerbated by the undeniable fact that judges on appeal courts often disagree vehemently among themselves about rights of political morality and must often, in the end, rely on majority voting to settle their own disagreements. It is not at all uncommon to see split votes when a court deals with a contentious issue of moral principle like affirmative action, abortion or pornography. And often these split votes follow patterns which are closely correlated with the all too discernible political leanings of  judges.[30]  Add to this the fact that judges render decisions which all too often appear to conflict not only with views widely shared in the community at large, but also with their own previous decisions in earlier cases, and what might seem like a marvelous idea in the abstract—constitutionally guaranteeing moral rights and fundamental interests against the abuse of government power—is transformed into a living nightmare. A nightmare in which democracy, fairness and the rule of law have, in effect, been abandoned and replaced by the rule of a few men and women, by a kind of ‘judicial oligarchy’. And no matter the high esteem in which we tend to hold our judges in modern constitutional democracies, this is not a form of government to be eagerly embraced.