Proportionality and justification

Proportionality: Constitutional Rights and their Limitation is the most comprehensive and authoritative account of the vast literature on proportionality and would be indispensable to anyone interested in the field. Barak evaluates several justifications for the use of proportionality and several defences of proportionality against its critics. This review article concentrates on one such defence: viewing proportionality as a structured and analytically coherent set of tests requiring the government to provide reasons and justifications for all of its actions. We identify several prominent recent writers, Barak among them, who represent a shift in the literature on proportionality towards a justification-based approach, and assess their rationales for the duty of the government to give justifications and provide reasons for its actions. However, we claim that those rationales do not necessarily support proportionality and that a more categorical approach, such as ‘exclusionary reasons,’ follows just as much from the ideas underlying justification and provides a better anchor for proportionality.