Abstract
We are grateful to Maria Cahill, Laura Cahillane, Saoirse Enright, David Kenny, and Rachael Walsh for their engagement with our Dublin University Law Journal Foreword, "The Constitution Under the New Supreme Court". Their responses substantiate the claim that the Supreme Court’s output over the past decade marks a significant point in the development of constitutional law that warrants detailed scholarly attention. Kenny, Cahillane, and Enright in their Afterwords explicitly periodise the Court’s constitutional case law. An era from the 1960s to the 1980s – frequently associated with Henchy and Walsh JJ – leading to a period of retrenchment in the 2000s is now replaced with something different: in Kenny’s characterisation, ‘a modest amount of constitutional innovation and intervention that does suggest the Court is much more active than it was previously’. In this Rejoinder we group our comments under two headings. First, we respond to how the commentators have engaged with our account of doctrine-building on the Court. Second, we offer our thoughts on a new theme that emerged in several of the Afterwords: the question of the appropriate audience for the Court’s judgments and the extent to which the Court should write with that audience in mind.