This chapter documents the array of tools and techniques judges use when carrying out their adjudicative role as part of a broader collaborative enterprise. Whilst the theoretical literature often presents courts as speaking in prospective, prescriptive, and peremptory terms, this chapter uncovers a vast array of collaborative devices which courts use in subtle but significant ways. Presenting the courts ’as catalyst’, and foregrounding the idea of ’judge as nudge’, this chapter explores the varied phenomena of judicial alerts, prods and pleas, soft suggestions, and judicial advice. It uses the controversial Nicklinson case on assisted suicide as a vehicle through which to examine collaborative constitutionalism before the courts. The chapter concludes by arguing that the devices canvassed in this chapter are best conceived as collaborative devices, rather than the ’passive virtues’ defended in Alexander Bickel’s canonical account of adjudication by the US Supreme Court.

I use a puzzling episode of judicial interpretation from South Africa to motivate the theoretical question about why judges sometimes alter their commitments to some legal interpretations but not others. I examine existing scholarship, which tends to portray judges as behaving in four distinct ways when engaged in legal interpretation: as guardians; as principled interpreters; as regime partners; or as strategic interpretors or deliberators. I argue that each of these portrayals falls short in explaining judges' shifting commitments to legal interpretation. Instead, I argue that judges are best understood as behaving as deliberative partners by combining key theoretical aspects of existing work into a novel theoretical position. I then outline the unique observable implications of each position and propose a fair test that examines judicial behavior in response to political parties' shifting stances on equality rights during key moments in Indian, South African, and American history.