Judicial review in Austria

The European and Austrian constitutions endow the Austrian court system with broad powers of judicial review. All Austrian courts are charged with verifying that the statutes and ordinances they are about to apply conform to European Union law, and to refuse to apply them if not. A specialized Constitutional Court checks statutes for compliance with the Austrian constitution and executive ordinances for compliance with Austrian law in general.

A system of administrative courts reviews individual-scope actions of the executive branch.

Influenced by Hans Kelsen and a general local tradition of legal positivism, the statutory construction of the Austrian Constitutional Court relied mostly on grammatical interpretation from its beginnings in 1920 to the mid-1980s. In the decades since then, the court has increasingly made use of teleological reasoning. Much of the court's workload is due to – and many of its decisions are the product of – unique distinctivenesses of the legal and political framework it is operating in.