The contribution of courts to the operations of constitutional democracy is a familiar issue in contemporary constitutional and political theory, rendered all the more vital in an era when the practice of judicial review has been extended globally. The lecture draws on the plan for representative democracy developed by Jeremy Bentham in his Constitutional Code (1822-32) to consider alternative approaches to judicial power in a democratic setting. Drawing on Bentham and on other constitutional experiments of his era, the lecture turns to legal history to enrich our resources and perspectives for considering political priorities in the design of courts and legal process.