(Friedman 2002), and has assumed increasing salience internationally as the power and influence of courts around the world has grown (Hirschl 2004). Many have defended judicial review as a way to reduce or correct systematic failures in legislative and executive decision making--thereby reducing the divergence between actual policy choices and those that would prevail in an ideally functioning representative democracy. Appropriately designed judicial review, on this view, can be justified on democratic grounds, even if judicial review is not itself a democratic institution. Critics, however, argue that judicial review tends to exacerbate rather than ameliorate the pathologies of representative democracy, and that the costs of judicial review typically exceed whatever benefits it may have.We analyze judicial review as a potential response to a particular problem: The incentive of elected officials to "posture" by taking bold but unwarranted action in response to a perceived emergency in order to appear competent to the voters. We begin by providing a brief overview of this potential problem and the debates over whether judicial review is an appropriate remedy. We then turn to presenting a model of political agency, without judicial review, to show how this sort of posturing may arise. We then modify this model by introducing judicial review.We show that judicial review has two main effects on the frequency of posturing. First, judicial reviewWe are grateful to