Conclusions
As a peculiar institution of Athenian constitutionalism, the graphe paranomon played a key role within the Athenian decree-making process, yet its implicaÂtions went beyond the borders of Attica[191] The grapheparanomon functioned as legitimising force in Athens, by ensuring the legal consistency of the deÂcrees with the laws that regulated the life of the Athenian community.
While this had clear and direct effects on Athenian domestic politics, the case of the Against Aristocrates shows that the Athenianjudicial review contributed to entrenching the rule of law in the sphere of public relations between Athens and its allies in order to justify its leadership and to its hegemonic ambitions.The use of �constitutionalism’ to enhance hegemony was not a novelty in the history of Greek imperialism and interstate relations. Low notes that the use of institutions to constrain and to legitimise the action of the hegemon is found, for example, in the creation of the synedria (federal councils) of the Delian League, of the Second Athenian League, and of the League of Corinth.[192] While these formal institutions were properly designed with the intent to regulate interstate relations under a single leadership, by contrast the graphe paranomon and the graphe nomon me epitedeion were constitutional institutions primarily meant for domestic purposes at the moment of the restoration of the Athenian democracy. Nevertheless, the structural and consistent use of such institutions to review Athenian decrees and laws made their effects much broader than originally planned.
Against Aristocrates, together with Against Leptines, demonstrate that judiÂcial review of legal norms in court represented a chance to provide Athenian foreign politics with a legal framework that legitimised the legislative actions of the Athenians before their allies and foreign counterparts, especially about honorific grants for foreign benefactors. Indeed, as Liddel has rightly noted, most of the preserved cases of graphai paranomon are concerned with honorÂary decrees showing at the same time how important and contentious the granting of honours had become in Athenian politics by this time.
As a result, although the original institutional purpose of the graphe paranomon was to make the judges the guardians of the hierarchy of laws and decrees, the sysÂtematic use of this procedure to assess honorary decrees created a scenario in which the institutions of judicial review had a significant impact on matters well beyond Athenian internal politics and constitutional balance; it is to be seen, as this chapter reiterates, seeping into the sphere of international relaÂtions. This is a significant example of path-dependant evolution of a juridical institution, which in time acquires new functions and performs new roles without any significant change in its rules and practices.[193]The forensic arguments contained within Against Aristocrates conform to this picture. Throughout the speech, Demosthenes offers direct citations of laws and decrees, he makes appeals to the intent of the lawgiver, and he proÂvides evidence of poor character in order to show that the decree in question was both against the laws and against the strategic interest of Athenian foreign policy. This institutional and legal analysis of a graphe paranomon speech seems to confirm Liddel’s claim of the persistence in Athenian public discourse of an imperialistic attitude about legislation (as the decree of Aristocrates itÂself attests) as well as of the need to legitimise this very legislation by appealÂing to the Panhellenic value of primacy of the laws secured by the procedures of judicial review.