Judicial oversight describes an aspect of the separation of powers

Separation of powers

The separation of powers, often imprecisely used interchangeably with the trias politica principle, is a model for the governance of a state. The model was first developed in ancient Greece and came into widespread use by the Roman Republic as part of the unmodified Constitution of the Roman Republic...

 prescribed by the Constitution of the United States, specifically the process whereby independent courts may review and restrain actions of the administrative and legislative branches. Such oversight is now common in other constitutional democracies.

In the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

, the national legislature has recently passed legislation aiming at reducing the discretion of the judiciary, specifically in the area of criminal sentencing (see Bureau of Prisons Rule. The United States Supreme Court has determined some of these laws to be unconstitutional, as in United States v. Booker

United States v. Booker

United States v. Booker, , was a United States Supreme Court decision concerning criminal sentencing. The Court ruled that the Sixth Amendment right to jury trial requires that, other than a prior conviction, only facts admitted by a defendant or proved beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury may be...

(2005).