This book addresses one of the most pressing issues of our time: the rise of populism and its legal-institutional implications, particularly for courts.

It tests, questions and ultimately challenges the prevailing view in the comparative constitutional law literature which holds that courts act as bulwarks against authoritarian, self-aggrandising populists.

The book offers both a new theoretical analysis and a fresh contextual inquiry. First, it develops a novel theoretical framework for analysing contemporary populism through the lens of 'spatiotemporality'-the conjunction of space and time. This theoretical analysis sheds light on the character of populism as a contemporary legal phenomenon and its constitutional project based on temporal efficiency and spatial proximity, which the book calls 'constitutional impatience.' Second, focusing primarily on one key institution of liberal constitutional democracy-the judiciary-the book offers a contextual analysis of three case studies that provide insights into contemporary populism and the various responses to it from a legal and institutional perspective. One of these case studies is from the UK and the other two are from the periphery or Global South, that is to say Armenia and Ecuador, offering new insights from these two understudied jurisdictions.