Abolishing the Death Penalty Through Constitutional Challenge

Eight countries have abolished the death penalty by constitutional challenge. Applying a lens of legal formalism, the unconstitutionality of the death penalty may be understood as a legal truth deduced through the judicial application of pure legal rules. Legal realism, on the other hand, contends that judicial decisions are informed by the social and political contexts in which they are made. As this report demonstrates, non-legal factors appear to have had significant influence on the abolition of the death penalty in each of the eight countries under consideration.