The judicialization of politics (Vallinder, 1992, Tate and Vallinder 1995, Shapiro and Stone 2002; Sieder, Schjolden, and Angell 2005) was set up to limit the state’s authority and to protect individual rights and freedoms from the State (Ginsburg, 2008). It demonstrates the wide range of governance tasks that courts perform, as well as the way in which courts can serve as critical sites of contention both among the ruling elite and between regimes and their citizens (Ginsburg, 2008). Anyhow, judicialization may take many forms and occur for many reasons. Judicialization may occur because government seeks to centralize its control, reduce its accountability to the courts, or curtail citizen''s rights (Sunkin, 1994). As what concern the post communist countries, the constitutional courts have traditionally played a marginal role in political life but in the second decade of the post communist era there’s a process towards the judicialization of the politics. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to observe the level and forms of judicialization induced by the Constitutional Court, using Albania as a case study and individualize the political consequences. My main hypothesis is that there’s a risk that the court may be exploited by important sites of political interests resulting in a “judicialization of authoritarian politics” (Moustafa 2003, 2007) and the second hypothesis is that elite heterogeneity and power asymmetry between the government and the opposition facilitates the judicialization process in such a political environment.
