Liberal Interpretation with Checks and Balances

A class monitor who can also punish anyone who disagrees with them is not really separate from the teacher — unless someone else can overrule the punishment. Modern democracies solved the same problem: pure Separation of Powers leaves each organ isolated and unaccountable, so they built in a way for the organs to watch and restrain each other instead.

In two minutes

Checks and balances is the liberal reworking of Montesquieu's doctrine: instead of keeping the three organs in watertight isolation, each is given a limited power to check the others, so no organ can act unrestrained even within its own sphere.

The rest of this chapter

The full explanation, the cheat sheet, every previous-year question at every mark weight, the quiz and the answer skeletons are part of Political Science – I: Political Theory and Political Organisation on LexBlox Semester. Sign in to unlock the subject, or read Module 1 of Legal Language and Writing free.