Judicial review and constitutionalism play an important role in Rawls’s thought on two large issues, namely, the institutionalization of the two principles of justice, and the Supreme Court as an “exemplar” of public reason.

Rawls thinks of his project as articulating a conception of justice specifically for a constitutional democracy. He seeks to show that the conception of justice originally outlined in part I of A Theory of Justice has institutional implications and can be extended into a “workable” political order that is “a reasonable approximation and extension of our considered judgments” (TJ 195). Hence, his theory requires some way of justifying an order of relations between majoritarian, legislative institutions, and adjudicative ones. Rawls does this through a procedure he calls “the four stage sequence of application.” The first, best-known stage of this procedure involves parties in the original position selecting principles of justice for the basic structure of society, with “the veil of ignorance” fully drawn. The principles of justice must then be embodied in actual political institutions under conditions of “partial compliance,” i.e., where political principles must be coercively enforced through law. As such, a set of political institutions can only be an “imperfect procedure” for implementing the principles of justice (TJ 201).