Notes

Preface

1. Thomas C. Grey, “Constitutionalism: An Analytical Framework,” in Constitutionalism, ed. J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 189–209, 189.

2. For a recent study equating constitutionalism with constitutional government, see Bruce Ackerman, Revolutionary Constitutions: Charismatic Leadership and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), 2: “Constitutionalism, as I understand it, involves the imposition of significant legal constraints on top decision-makers.” For a recent study equating constitutionalism with having adopted a modern type of written constitution, see Linda Colley, The Gun, the Ship and the Pen: Warfare, Constitutions, and the Making of the Modern World (London: Profile Books, 2021), 218: “It was Magna Carta … that lay at the root of all subsequent written efforts at constitutionalism.” In “Constitutionalism: A Skeptical View,” Waldron comes closer to the key issue but then equivocates over its meaning and focuses his criticisms on the equation of constitutionalism with limited government: Jeremy Waldron, Political Political Theory: Essays on Institutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), chap. 2.

Introduction

1. Charles Howard McIlwain, Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1940), 13. Wheeler states that “McIlwain performed an astounding tour de force. Laying down what was to become acclaimed as the bible for all succeeding theorists of constitutionalism, he purported to display the essence of the topic and did so … without carrying his essential story beyond England of 1630.” Harvey Wheeler, “The Foundations of Constitutionalism,” Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 8 (1975): 507–586, 564.

2. McIlwain, Constitutionalism, 21.

3. Edward S. Corwin, “The ‘Higher Law’ Background of American Constitutional Law,” Harvard Law Review 42 (1928): 149–185, 153.

4. Francis D. Wormuth, The Origins of Modern Constitutionalism (New York: Harper, 1949), 3. The allusion to “auxiliary precautions” is a reference to James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, The Federalist Papers [1787–1788], ed. I. Kramnick (London: Penguin, 1987), no. 51 (Madison).

5. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws [1748], trans. A. Cohler, B. Miller, and H. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

6. M. J. C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), 2.

7. Thomas Paine, “Rights of Man” [1791], in his Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings, ed. M. Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 83–331, 122.

8. Paine, “Rights of Man,” 92.

9. See Gary Jeffrey Jacobsohn, Constitutional Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 8–9: “This approach to identity [is] deeply constitutive, as it reflects an understanding of the constitution as the foundation for both legal and social relations within a polity.… [W]hat is constitutive of the identity of a polity seems to us to be rooted in extra-constitutional factors such as religion and culture than in the language of a legal document” (emphasis in original).

10. Jed Rubenfeld, Freedom and Time: A Theory of Constitutional Self-Government (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 163, 177, 163.

11. Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right” [c. 1843], ed. J. O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 29–30.

12. See, e.g., Larry D. Kramer, The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Richard Bellamy, Political Constitutionalism: A Republican Defence of the Constitutionality of Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Mark Tushnet, “Authoritarian Constitutionalism: Some Conceptual Issues,” in Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes, ed. Tom Ginsburg and Alberto Simpser (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 36–50.

13. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to James Madison, 6 September 1789,” and “Letter to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816,” in Thomas Jefferson: Political Writings, ed. J. Appleby and T. Ball (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 593–598, 210–217.

14. Federalist 57 (Hamilton). See also Federalist 43 (Madison): “The express authority of the people alone could give due validity to the Constitution.”

15. François Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. E. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 4.

16. See Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1961), chap. 1.

17. See Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 55: “European theory has driven studies of the state … and this has meant an emphasis on the nature and activities of the central state.… It is obvious that this singular term does not work well for a polity such as the United States, in which multiple institutions carry out ‘state’ activities.” See also Max M. Edling, Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the US Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 12, 14: “The American union reserved to the states the power to regulate the social, economic, and civic life of their citizens and inhabitants with only limited supervision and control from the national government.… The federal government did not replace the states as the central locus of power before the middle of the twentieth century.”

18. Somerset v. Stewart, 98 ER 499 (1772); Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 80.

19. Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 US 543 (1823); United States v. Rogers, 45 US 567, 572 (1845), Taney C.J.: “The native tribes who were found on this continent at the time of its discovery have never been acknowledged or treated as independent nationals by the European governments, nor regarded as the owners of the territories they respectively occupied. On the contrary, the whole continent was divided and parcelled out, and granted by the governments of Europe as if it had been vacant and unoccupied land, and the Indians continually held to be, and treated as, subject to their Dominion and control.”

20. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 US 393, 406, 407 (1857), Taney C.J.: “The question then arises, whether the provisions of the Constitution … embraced the negro African race.… They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social, or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

21. US Const., art. I, § 8: “The Congress shall have the Power.… To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.”

22. US Const., art. I, § 2, cl. 3; art. I, § 9; art. IV, § 2, cl. 3.

23. “Letter from Jefferson to George Rogers Clark, 25 December 1780,” National Archives, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-04-02-0295. See also Adam Burns, American Imperialism: The Territorial Expansion of the United States, 1783–2013 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), chap. 1.

24. Paul W. Kahn, Origins of Order: Project and System in the American Legal Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 40.

25. Kahn, Origins of Order, 10.

26. Edward S. Corwin, John Marshall and the Constitution: A Chronicle of the Supreme Court (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1919), chaps. 1, 5; James F. Simon, What Kind of Nation? Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and the Epic Struggle to Create a United States (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).

27. David Jayne Hill, Americanism, What It Is (New York: Appleton & Co., 1916), 49: “The Civil War … did not involve a denial of the fundamental principles upon which American constitutionalism is based. It consisted, on the contrary, merely in a difference of documentary interpretation.”

28. Hill, Americanism, 40.

29. David Runciman, The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 77; McIlwain, Constitutionalism, 134: “In parts of Europe, it will be noted, the incompetence of constitutional governments led to their replacement by despotisms.”

30. Hill, Americanism, 56.

31. Quotations from Franklin D. Roosevelt, Address on Constitution Day, September 17, 1937, the American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-constitution-day-washington-dc. There is, of course, a more complex story to be told: Bruce Ackerman, We the People, vol. 3, The Civil Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), 26: “A funny thing happened to Americans on the way to the twenty-first century. We have lost our ability to write down our new constitutional commitments in the old-fashioned way. This is no small problem for a country that imagines itself living under a written Constitution.” The issue is taken up in Chapter 10.

32. Basic Law, art. 79(3).

33. Basic Law, art. 21(2). On constrained democracy, see Karl Loewenstein, “Militant Democracy and Fundamental Rights,” American Political Science Review 31 (1937): 417–432 (pt. I); 638–658 (pt. II).

34. Lüth, BVerfGE 7, 198 (1958).

35. Basic Law, art. 146.

36. See Christoph Möllers, “ ‘We Are (Afraid) of the People’: Constituent Power in German Constitutionalism,” in The Paradox of Constitutionalism: Constituent Power and Constitutional Form, ed. Martin Loughlin and Neil Walker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 87–106.

37. For the complexities, see Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).

38. McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 US (4 Wheat.) 316, 407 (1819), Marshall C.J.

39. Speech by B. R. Ambedkar, “Constituent Assembly of India, 4 November 1948,” cited in Madhav Khosla, India’s Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 42–43. The quotation on “paramount reverence” is taken from same speech and is cited in Sujit Choudhry, Madhav Khosla, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3.

40. Khosla, India’s Founding Moment, 22.

41. Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, AIR 1461 (1973); Minerva Mills Ltd v. Union of India, AIR 1789 (1980). See also Upendra Baxi, “Law, Politics, and Constitutional Hegemony: The Supreme Court, Jurisprudence, and Demosprudence,” in Choudhry et al., The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution, 94–109.

42. Choudhry et al., The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution, 6.

43. See “Timeline of Constitutions” of the Comparative Constitutions Project, https://comparativeconstitutionsproject.org/chronology/, accessed August 25, 2021.

44. For empirical analysis, see David S. Law and Mila Versteeg, “The Evolution and Ideology of Global Constitutionalism,” California Law Review 99 (2011): 1153–1257.

45. Samuel Issacharoff, “Populism versus Democratic Governance,” in Constitutional Democracy in Crisis?, ed. Mark A. Graber, Sanford Levinson, and Mark Tushnet (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 445–458, 445. Many of these regimes are now under stress, an issue considered in the Conclusion.

46. Tom Ginsburg and Mila Versteeg, “Why Do Countries Adopt Constitutional Review?,” Journal of Law, Economics & Organization 30 (2014): 587–622, 587: “By our account, some 38% of all constitutional systems had constitutional review in 1951; by 2011, 83% of the world’s constitutions had given courts the power to supervise implementation of the constitution and to set aside legislation for constitutional incompatibility.”

47. See Martin Loughlin, “What Is Constitutionalization?,” in The Twilight of Constitutionalism?, ed. Petra Dobner and Martin Loughlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), chap. 3.

48. Ran Hirschl, Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 8–9.

49. Gordon J. Schochet, “Introduction: Constitutionalism, Liberalism, and the Study of Politics,” in Constitutionalism, ed. J. Roland Pennock and John W. Chapman (New York: New York University Press, 1979), 1–15, 6.

50. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (New York: Vintage Books, 1962); Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (New York: Scribner, 1975); Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire, 1875–1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987); Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Abacus, 1995).

51. For critical assessment of Hobsbawm’s account of twentieth century developments, see Tony Judt, “Downhill all the Way,” in his When the Facts Change: Essays 1995–2010 (New York: Penguin, 2015), chap. 1.

52. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948), 129–156.

53. Federalist 1 (Hamilton): “It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country … to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

54. Ulrich Beck, Wolfgang Bonss, and Christophe Lau, “The Theory of Reflexive Modernization: Problematic, Hypotheses and Research Programme,” Theory, Culture & Society 20 (2003): 1–33, 1.

55. Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, “Varieties of Second Modernity: The Cosmopolitan Turn in Social and Political Theory and Research,” British Journal of Sociology 61 (2010): 409–443.

56. See the discussions in Dobner and Loughlin, The Twilight of Constitutionalism?

57. This promise led to the advocacy of “transformative constitutionalism” in a number of postwar regimes: see, e.g., Gautam Bhatia, The Transformative Constitution: A Radical Biography in Nine Acts (Uttar Pradesh: HarperCollins, 2019); Armin von Bogdandy et al., eds., Transformative Constitutionalism in Latin America: The Emergence of a New Ius Commune (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Karl Klare, “Legal Culture and Transformative Constitutionalism,” South African Journal on Human Rights 14 (1998): 146–188; Michaela Hailbronner, “Transformative Constitutionalism: Not Only in the Global South,” American Journal of Comparative Law 65 (2017): 527–565.

58. Stephen Gill and A. Claire Cutler, eds., New Constitutionalism and World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 11: “Neoliberalism has been less a discipline of economics than a discipline statecraft and law.”

59. See, e.g., Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism (London: Thomas Nelson, 1965); Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire, chap. 1.

60. F. A. Hayek, “New Nations and the Problem of Power,” The Listener, November 10, 1960, 819: “I believe that limiting the powers of democracy in these new parts of the world is the only chance of preserving democracy in those parts of the world. If democracies do not limit their own powers they will be destroyed.” Cited in Slobodian, Globalists, 4. See further F.A. Hayek, “A Model Constitution,” in Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 3, The Political Order of a Free People (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 105–127.

61. Compare Gary Jeffrey Jacobsohn and Yaniv Roznai, Constitutional Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020). Presenting valuable studies of developments in Germany, India, and Israel, this work comes unstuck on the concept of “constitutional revolution.” The authors are unable to distinguish between “revolution” and “evolution” because they fail to recognize that the “paradigmatic shift” they identify, being the product of constitutionalization, reshapes these constitutions in accordance with the precepts of constitutionalism.

Constitutions

1. See, e.g., Giovanni Sartori, “Constitutionalism: A Preliminary Discussion,” American Political Science Review 56 (1962): 853–864; Dieter Grimm, “The Origins and Transformation of the Concept of the Constitution,” in his Constitutionalism: Past, Present, and Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3–37, 3.

2. Charles Howard McIlwain, Constitutionalism: Ancient and Modern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1940), 26.

3. M. J. C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1998), 37.

4. Ptolemy of Lucca, On the Government of Rulers: De regimine principum, trans. J. M. Blythe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); James M. Blythe, Ideal Government and the Mixed Constitution in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).

5. The term first appeared in Theodore Beza, Du droit des magistrats (1574), where it was invoked to bolster his argument that magistrates had the right to have the king deposed if he failed to keep within the lawfully conferred powers under “les loix fondamentales d’un Royaume”: Constitutionalism and Resistance in the Sixteenth Century: Three Treatises by Hotman, Beza and Mornay, ed. J. H. Franklin (New York: Pegasus, 1969). On ideological dispute, see Martyn P. Thompson, “The History of Fundamental Law in Political Thought from the French Wars of Religion to the American Revolution,” American Historical Review 91 (1986): 1103–1128.

6. See J. W. Gough, Fundamental Law in English Constitutional History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955).

7. See respectively, “The Act Erecting a High Court of Justice for the King’s Trial, 6 January 1649,” in The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625–1660, ed. S. R. Gardiner, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 357; Commons Journal, 28 January 1688, cited in Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 284.

8. “Sentence of the High Court of Justice upon the King, 27 January 1649,” in Gardiner, The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 372.

9. Gerald Stourzh, “Constitution: Changing Meanings of the Term from the Early Seventeenth to the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Conceptual Change and the Constitution, ed. Terence Ball and J. G. A. Pocock (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988), 35–54, 43.

10. Anonymous, Touching the Fundamentall Laws, or Politique Constitution of this Kingdom (London: Thomas Underhill, 1643), in The Struggle for Sovereignty: Seventeenth-Century English Political Tracts, ed. Joyce Lee Malcolm, vol. 1 (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1999), 261–279, 264.

11. McIlwain, Constitutionalism, 23: “Glanvill frequently uses the word ‘constitution’ for a royal edict.… At this time [the thirteenth century], and for centuries after, ‘constitution’ always means a particular administrative enactment much as it had meant to the Roman lawyers.”

12. “The Instrument of Government,” 16 December 1653, in Gardiner, The Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 405.

13. “The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, 1 March 1669,” The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/nc05.asp.

14. Stourzh, “Constitution,” 45: “The use of the word ‘unconstitutional’ suddenly spread in North America, once it had been first used in 1764 / 65 in Rhode Island.”

15. Dieter Grimm, “The Concept of Constitution in Historical Perspective,” in his Constitutionalism, 89–124, 90.

16. Emer de Vattel, The Law of Nations, or Principles of the Law of Nature Applied to the Conduct of Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns [1758] (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2008), § 27.

17. Viscount Bolingbroke, “A Dissertation upon Parties,” in his Political Writings, ed. D. Armitage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1–191, 88.

18. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws [1748], trans. A. Cohler, B. Miller, and H. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), book 3.

19. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, book 9, chap. 1. But note that Montesquieu here may have influenced the American founders with his claim that a confederation, composed of small republics, “enjoys the goodness of the internal government of each one; and, with regard to the exterior, it has, by the force of the association, all the advantages of large monarchies.”

20. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, book 11, chap. 4.

21. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, book 11, chap. 5.

22. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, book 11, chap. 6.

23. Judith N. Shklar, Montesquieu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 112.

24. Grimm, “The Origins and Transformation of the Concept of the Constitution,” 20.

25. John A. Hawgood, Modern Constitutions since 1787 (London: Macmillan, 1939), 3. See further Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, “The Historical Evolution and Changes in the Meaning of the Constitution,” in his Constitutional and Political Theory, ed. M. Künkler and T. Stein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), chap. 6.

26. See Kelly L. Grotke and Markus J. Prutsch, eds., Constitutionalism, Legitimacy, and Power: Nineteenth-Century Experiences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

27. Hawgood, Modern Constitutions since 1787, 81: “The story of Bonapartist constitutionalism was very much the same everywhere. Republics one and indivisible on the model of 1795 were succeeded by republics dependent and variable on the model of 1799, and these in their turn gave place to monarchies consanguineous and subservient on the model of 1802–4.… Everywhere the shadow of representative government and popular sovereignty was conceded and their substance denied.”

28. Hawgood, Modern Constitutions since 1787, chaps. 8–10; Markus J. Prutsch, “ ‘Monarchical Constitutionalism’ in Post-Napoleonic Europe: Concept and Practice,” in Grotke and Prutsch, Constitutionalism, Legitimacy, and Power, chap. 4; Volker Sellin, “Restorations and Constitutions,” in Grotke and Prutsch, Constitutionalism, Legitimacy, and Power, chap. 5.

29. See Johannes Althusius, Politica: Politics Methodically Set Forth and Illustrated with Sacred and Profane Examples [1603], trans. F. S. Carney (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1995).

30. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). This trope is replicated in European political thought of the period: see, e.g., François Hotman, Francogallia [1573], ed. R. E. Giesey and J. H. M. Salmon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972).

31. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, book 11, chap. 6.

32. Joseph de Maistre, “Study on Sovereignty” [1794–1795], in Works, ed. J. Lively (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 93–129, 107, 103.

33. Edmund Burke, An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs [1791], ed. J. M. Robson (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), 134.

34. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France [1790] (London: Penguin, 1968), 106: “A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation.”

35. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Mind [1830], trans. W. Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), § 540.

36. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, Staat, Gesellschaft, Freiheit: Studien zur Staatstheorie und zum Verfassungsrecht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1976), 60.

37. Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon, “L’industrie ou discussions politiques, morales et philosophiques” [1817], in his Oeuvres, vol. 2 (Paris: Edition Anthropos, 1966), 82–93; Lorenz von Stein, The History of the Social Movement in France, 1789–1850 [1850], trans. K. Mengelberg (Totowa, NJ: Bedminster Press, 1964), 75–79; Ferdinand Lassalle, “Über Verfassungswesen” [1862], in his Gesamtwerke, ed. E. Blum (Leipzig: Pfau, 1901), 72–93.

38. Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1913); Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History and Its Growth [1945], trans. J. F. Huntington (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1993), 240–242.

The Ideology of Constitutionalism

1. Clifford Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” in his The Interpretation of Cultures (London: Fontana, 1973), 193–233.

2. Giovanni Sartori, “Constitutionalism: A Preliminary Discussion,” American Political Science Review 56 (1962): 853–864, 855.

3. Sartori, “Constitutionalism,” 856, 855.

4. Sartori, “Constitutionalism,” 859.

5. Sartori, “Constitutionalism,” 859, 860.

6. For empirical analysis of the degree to which contemporary regimes fail to protect the rights enacted in their constitutions (and therefore meet Sartori’s category of “façade constitution”), see David S. Law and Mila Versteeg, “Sham Constitutions,” California Law Review 101 (2013): 863–952.

7. John Adams, “Novanglus no. 7,” in Works, ed. C. F. Adams, vol. 4 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1856), 106.

8. A. V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, 8th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1915), 191–195.

9. Dicey, Law of the Constitution, 197.

10. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), 193.

11. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Elements of Justice [1797] (Part I of the Metaphysics of Morals; known as the Rechtslehre), trans. J. Ladd (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1999), § 45.

12. Exemplary of the conservative account is Friedrich Julius Stahl, Die Philosophie des Rechts nach geschichtlicher Ansicht [1833–1837], 2 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1878). With respect to the liberal version, see Robert von Mohl, Die Polizeiwissenschaft nach den Grundsätzen des Rechtsstaates [1832], 3rd ed. (Tübingen: Laupp, 1866). For discussion, see Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, “The Origin and Development of the Concept of the Rechtsstaat,” in his State, Society and Liberty: Studies in Political Theory and Constitutional Law, trans. J. A. Underwood (New York: Berg, 1991), 47–70.

13. See, e.g., Rudolf von Jhering, The Struggle for Law [1872], trans. J. J. Lalor (Chicago: Callaghan & Co., 1915). Jhering argued that the state’s power must be restrained by the concept of self-limitation (Selbstbeschränkung): that is, the state maintained its authority by binding itself to certain liberal norms.

14. Dicey, Law of the Constitution, 189.

15. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 200.

16. Dicey, Law of the Constitution, 324–325.

17. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 201: “To the men who devised the system, especially to its main architect, Rudolf von Gneist … this creation of a system of separate administrative courts … appeared as the crowning piece of the Rechtsstaat, the definite achievement of the rule of law.” See Rudolf von Gneist, Der Rechtsstaat (Berlin: Springer, 1872). And on France, see H. S. Jones, The French State in Question: Public Law and Political Argument in the Third Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chap. 2.

18. A. V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relation between Law and Public Opinion in England during the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1905), 309.

19. Dicey, Law of the Constitution, xxxv–cxxi.

20. Cited in M. J. C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1998), 131. Similarly, in the Maryland Declaration of Rights, 1776, art. VI: “That the legislative, executive and judicial powers of government, ought to be forever separate and distinct from each other.”

21. Federalist 47. Madison also notes that those state constitutions, such as Virginia and Maryland, that supposedly are designed to institute a separation of powers, do, in fact, provide for balancing. In Maryland’s constitution, for example, the executive magistrate is appointable by the legislature and the judiciary by the executive.

22. This is the basic thesis of Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

23. See Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978).

24. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. V. Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 39–152.

25. Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, “What Is the Third Estate?” [1789], in his Political Writings, trans. M. Sonenscher (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2003), 92–162, 137, 139.

26. See Alec Stone, The Birth of Judicial Politics in France: The Constitutional Council in Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pt. I.

27. See Stephen Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); Harold J. Laski, “The Political Theory of Royer-Collard,” in his Authority in the Modern State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1919), chap. 4; François Guizot, The History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe, trans. A.R. Scoble (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2002).

28. On the French debates, see Jones, The French State in Question, chaps. 5–7.

29. Sartori, “Constitutionalism,” 862.

30. See, e.g., in the United States, Woodrow Wilson, Constitutional Government in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1908); in Germany, Ernst Forsthoff, Rechtstaat im Wandel: Verfassungsrechtliche Abhandlungen 1950–1964 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1964); in France, Georges Burdeau, “Zur Auflösung des Verfassunsgbegriffs,” Der Staat (1962): 389–404.

The Constitution of What?

1. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [1651], ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 75.

2. Georg Jellinek, Allgemeine Staatslehre, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Springer, 1922), 337–344 (“die normative Kraft des Faktischen”).

3. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum [1950], trans. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos Press, 2003), 48.

4. French Constitution of 1791, Art. 1, title 2. This form was retained in the 1793 and 1848 republican constitutions. Art. 1 of the 1958 Constitution states: “France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic.” The National Convention declaration is cited in Westel W. Willoughby, The Fundamental Concepts of Public Law (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 66.

5. For a recent illustration, see Yaniv Roznai and Silvia Şuteu, “The Eternal Territory? The Crimean Crisis and Ukraine’s Territorial Integrity as an Unamendable Constitutional Principle,” German Law Journal 16 (2015): 542–580.

6. Ernest Renan, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1882); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991); Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 55.

7. Poindexter v. Greenhow, 114 U.S. 270 (1885), 290.

8. Texas v. White, 74 U.S. 700 (1868), 700.

9. C. F. von Gerber, Grundzüge eines Systems des deutschen Staatsrechts (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1865); Paul Laband, Das Staatsrecht des deutschen Reiches, 4 vols. (Tübingen: Laupp, 1876–1882).

10. See Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, “The Concept and Problems of the Constitutional State,” in his Constitutional and Political Theory: Selected Writings, ed. M. Künkler and T. Stein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), chap. 5.

11. Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Commonweale [1576], ed. K. D. McRae, trans. R. Knolles [1606] (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 199, 249–250.

12. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. G. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 17.

13. Dieter Grimm, “The Origins and Transformation of the Concept of the Constitution,” in his Constitutionalism: Past, Present, and Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3–37, 3: “Every political unit is constituted, but not every one of them has a constitution.”

14. Rudolf Smend, Verfassung und Verfassungsrecht (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1928), 78: “Die Verfassung ist die Rechtsordnung des Staats, genauer des Lebens, in dem der Staat seine Lebenswirklichkeit hat, nämlich seines Integrationsprozesses.” Excerpts are found in Arthur J. Jacobson and Bernhard Schlink, eds., Weimar: A Jurisprudence of Crisis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 213–248.

15. Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory [1928], trans. J. Seitzer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), §§ 1, 2, 67.

16. Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, 62–63 (emphases in original). Schmitt evidently has in mind Hans Kelsen’s influential normative positivist state theory, but his account also applies to nonpositivist variants. See Hans Kelsen, General Theory of Law and State, trans. A. Wedberg (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945).

17. Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, 65, 75, 60, 61 (emphases in original).

18. Hermann Heller, Staatslehre [1934], in his Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3 (Leiden: A. W. Sijthoff, 1971), 79–395; part III has been translated by D. Dyzenhaus as Hermann Heller, “The Nature and Function of the State,” Cardozo Law Review 18 (1996): 1139–1216, 1179, 1180.

19. Heller, “The Nature and Function of the State,” 1187, 1190–1191.

20. Heller, “The Nature and Function of the State,” 1214.

21. Heller, “The Nature and Function of the State,” 1214–1215, 1216.

The Path to Ordo-constitutionalism

1. Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 291, 87.

2. See, e.g., Edward L. Rubin, Beyond Camelot: Rethinking Politics and Law for the Modern State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Paul Tucker, Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).

3. See, e.g., Carl Schmitt, “The Motorized Legislator” [1950], in High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity, ed. Hartmut Rosa and William E. Scheuerman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 65–73, 65: “Since 1914 all major historical events and developments in every European country have contributed to making the process of legislation ever faster and more summary, the path to realizing legal regulation ever shorter, and the role of legal science ever smaller.” On “statutorification,” see Grant Gilmore, The Ages of American Law (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); Guido Calabresi, A Common Law for the Age of Statutes (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).

4. Carl Schmitt, “The Plight of European Jurisprudence” [1943–1944], Telos 83 (1990): 35–71, 63.

5. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (London: Gollancz, 1942).

6. Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship, trans. E. A. Shils (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), 5, 58, 107, 71.

7. Jens Meierhenrich, The Remnants of the Rechtsstaat: An Ethnography of Nazi Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 40. See also Douglas G. Morris, Legal Sabotage: Ernst Fraenkel in Hitler’s Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), chap. 4.

8. Michael Oakeshott, “On the Character of a Modern European State,” in his On Human Conduct (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 185–326, 200–201.

9. Oakeshott, “Modern European State,” 251–252, 268.

10. Oakeshott, “Modern European State,” 320, 323.

11. Paul W. Kahn, The Origins of Order: Project and System in the American Legal Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), x–xi, 47.

12. Kahn, The Origins of Order, xi, 249.

13. Kahn, The Origins of Order, 157.

14. Kahn, The Origins of Order, 187–188.

15. Kahn, The Origins of Order, xiv.

16. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom [1944] (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 12, 83, 72, 167, 6.

17. F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), 85, 103, 156.

18. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 181, 182, 205.

19. F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 1, Rules and Order (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 2 (hereafter Rules and Order).

20. Hayek, Rules and Order, 14.

21. Hayek, Rules and Order, 100, 133, 134.

22. F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 2, The Mirage of Social Justice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), 64, xii.

23. F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 3, The Political Order of a Free People (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), chap. 17 (hereafter The Political Order of a Free People).

24. Hayek, The Political Order of a Free People, 109, 110.

25. Hayek, The Political Order of a Free People, 113, 114, 119, 121.

26. Chandran Kukathas, “Hayek and the State,” in Law, Liberty and State: Oakeshott, Hayek and Schmitt on the Rule of Law, ed. David Dyzenhaus and Thomas Poole (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 281–294, 294.

27. See John Finnis, Aquinas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 20–29.

28. Ordo-liberalism, strictly a general movement rather than a school, comprises three main strands. First, the Freiburg School of lawyers and economists, who issued the “Ordo Manifesto” of 1936. Second, the “sociological neoliberals,” represented mainly by Wilhelm Röpke and Alexander Rüstow. See Alexander Rüstow, Freedom and Domination: A Historical Critique of Civilization [orig. 3 vols., 1950, 1952, 1957], trans. S. Attanasio (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). And third, the postwar advocates of the social market economy (soziale Marktwirtschaft), represented by Ludwig Erhard, minister of economic affairs from 1949 to 1963 and then chancellor of the Federal Republic from 1963 to 1966. For an overview of Ordo-liberalism, see Carl J. Friedrich, “The Political Thought of Neoliberalism,” American Political Science Review 49 (1955): 509–525.

29. Franz Böhm, Walter Eucken, and Hans Grossman-Doerth, “The Ordo Manifesto of 1936,” in Germany’s Social Market Economy: Origins and Evolution, ed. Alan Peacock and Hans Willgerodt (London: Macmillan, 1989), 15–26, 23.

30. Walter Eucken, The Foundations of Economics: History and Theory in the Analysis of Economic Reality, trans. T. Hutchinson (London: William Hodge & Co., 1950), 118, 57.

31. Franz Böhm, “Rule of Law in a Market Economy,” in Peacock and Willgerodt, Germany’s Social Market Economy, 46–67, 50, 62–63, 63–64.

32. Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, Art. 79(3); Lüth BVerfGE 7, 198 (1958).

33. See, e.g., the constitutional structure of the European Union, which is established as “a highly competitive social market economy” (Art. 3.3 TEU) and promotes a monetary union policed by an independent European Central Bank (Art. 130 TFEU).

34. Note, e.g., the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, art. 21(2): “Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behaviour of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional.”

35. Pierre Rosanvallon, Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust, trans. A. Goldhammer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Constituent Power

1. See, e.g., George Lawson, Politica sacra et civilis [1678], ed. C. Condren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 47.

2. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government [1680], ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), vol. 2, § 222.

3. Julian H. Franklin, John Locke and the Theory of Sovereignty: Mixed Monarchy and the Right of Resistance in the Political Thought of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988).

4. Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776, Preamble.

5. Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate? [1789], in his Political Writings, trans. M. Sonenscher (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2003), 92–162.

6. Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate?, 136, 137.

7. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract [1762], in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. V. Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 39–152, 114: “Sovereignty cannot be represented.… The deputies of the people therefore are not and cannot be its representatives, they are merely its agents; they cannot conclude anything definitively.”

8. Lucia Rubinelli, “How to Think beyond Sovereignty: On Sieyes and Constituent Power,” European Journal of Political Theory 18 (2019): 47–67, 51.

9. Lucia Rubinelli, Constituent Power: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 66.

10. Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate?, 139, 140.

11. William H. Sewell Jr., A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution: The Abbé Sieyes and What Is the Third Estate? (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1994), 39; Marcio Pereira, “Machines de travail: Constituent Power and the Order of Labor in Sieyes’s Thought,” Constellations 25 (2018): 669–679.

12. Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate?, 110.

13. Sewell, A Rhetoric of Bourgeois Revolution, 152.

14. See Andrew Arato, Post Sovereign Constitution Making: Learning and Legitimacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Compare Joel Colón-Ríos, Constituent Power and the Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

15. Raymond Carré de Malberg, Contribution à la Théorie générale de l’État [1922] (Paris: Dalloz, 2004), 483–504, 504. See further Olivier Beaud, La puissance de l’État (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1994), 313–328.

16. François Furet, “The French Revolution Is Over,” in his Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. E. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 1–79.

17. See Christoph Möllers, “Pouvoir Constituant-Constitution-Constitutionalisation,” in Principles of European Constitutional Law, ed. A. von Bogdandy and J. Bast (Oxford: Hart, 2011), 169–204, 171–172.

18. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, “The Constituent Power of the People: A Liminal Concept of Constitutional Law,” in his Constitutional and Political Theory: Selected Writings, ed. M. Künkler and T. Stein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 168–185, 172.

19. Napoleon Bonaparte, The Corsican: A Diary of Napoleon’s Life in His Own Words [1804], ed. R. M. Johnston (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910), 182.

20. Böckenförde, “The Constituent Power of the People,” 173.

21. Sieyès, What Is the Third Estate?, 97, 136.

22. See, e.g., Egon Zweig, Die Lehre vom Pouvoir Constituant: Ein Beitrag zum Staatsrecht der französischen Revolution (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1909); Robert Redslob, Staatstheorie der französischen Nationalversammlung von 1789 (Leipzig: von Veit, 1912).

23. Hans Kelsen, “What Is the Pure Theory of Law?,” Tulane Law Review 34 (1959–1960): 269–276.

24. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty [1922], trans. G. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 12.

25. See Lars Vinx, The Guardian of the Constitution: Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt on the Limits of Constitutional Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), chap. 3.

26. Schmitt, Political Theology, 5, 17 (translation of first quotation modified).

27. Hermann Heller, “The Nature and Function of the State” [1934], Cardozo Law Review 18 (1996): 1139–1216 (part III of Heller’s Staatslehre [1934]).

28. Hermann Heller, Sovereignty: A Contribution to the Theory of Public and International Law [1927], trans. B. Cooper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 110: “An idealism … that at some point finally resolves the given tension in the direction of the mind is not one whit better, epistemologically or ethically, than a materialism that does the opposite.”

29. See, e.g., President Lincoln’s actions during the American Civil War, discussed in Chapter 11.

30. See, e.g., Bruce Ackerman’s account of constitutional development, discussed in Chapter 10.

Constitutional Rights

1. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man [1791–1792], in his Rights of Man, Common Sense and Other Political Writings, ed. M. Philp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 83–331, 120, 213, 210.

2. Cited in Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1922), 37.

3. John Millar, The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks [1771] (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2006), 278–279.

4. Jeremy Bentham, “Anarchical Fallacies: An Examination of the Declaration of Rights Issued during the French Revolution,” in Works, vol. 2, ed. J. Bowring (London: Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1843), 489–534.

5. See, e.g., Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977); Dworkin, Freedom’s Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

6. The American Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments adopted in 1791, was adopted ostensibly to provide assurances to anti-Federalists rather than as necessary elements of the constitutional settlement. Expressing skepticism about the value of “parchment barriers” and placing greater reliance on “balances and checks,” Madison was also concerned that the enumerated rights would be taken to be a complete list of existing rights. See Jack N. Rakove, Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), 144. Until 1971, the French Declaration of Rights was treated as a purely political declaration when, in a landmark ruling of the Constitutional Council (Décision no. 71-44 DC, 16 July 1971), it was held to have binding effect.

7. Paine, Rights of Man, 119.

8. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen [1647], ed. R. Tuck and M. Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 28–29.

9. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [1651], ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 110.

10. Hobbes, On the Citizen, 29.

11. Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 30.

12. Hobbes, On the Citizen, 137: “Men do not make a clear enough distinction between a people and a crowd. A people is a single entity, with a single will; you can attribute an act to it. None of this can be said of a crowd” (emphases in original).

13. Hobbes, On the Citizen, 150–151.

14. See Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 18.

15. See Hobbes, Leviathan, chap. 9; Thomas Hobbes, The Author’s Epistle Dedicatory to De Corpore [1656], in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury, vol. 1, ed. W. Molesworth (London: J. Bohn, 1839), ix: “Civil science is no older than my own book, De Cive.”

16. Samuel Pufendorf, De jure naturae et gentium [1672], On the Law of Nature and Nations, trans. C. H. and W. A. Oldfather (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), chap. 7, §§ 2–3.

17. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government [1680], ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), vol. 2, §§ 123–126, 136.

18. Locke, Two Treatises of Government, vol. 2, §§ 149, 224–226. Compare Hobbes, On the Citizen, 134, who argued that leaving it to the individual to decide whether the sovereign has complied with the terms of the covenant “exposes any King, good or bad, to the risk of being condemned by the judgement, and murdered by the hand, of one solitary assassin.”

19. Becker, The Declaration of Independence, 27: “Most Americans had absorbed Locke’s works as a kind of political gospel; and the Declaration, in its form, follows closely certain sentences in Locke’s second treatise on government.”

20. Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in his Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 118–172, 122–131; C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 257–262.

21. See J. T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), part II.

22. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men” [1755], in his The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, ed. V. Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 111–222, 173.

23. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract [1762], in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. V. Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 39–152.

24. Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” 131–134.

25. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 53.

26. François Furet, The French Revolution, 1770–1814, trans. A. Nevill (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), chap. 3; Jeremy Jennings, Revolution and the Republic: A History of Political Thought in France since the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chap. 6.

Constitutional Democracy

1. Benjamin Constant, Principles of Politics Applicable to all Governments [1810], ed. E. Hoffman, trans. D. O’Keeffe (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2003), 20.

2. Benjamin Constant, “The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation and their Relation to European Civilization,” in his Political Writings, trans. B. Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 43–167, 74.

3. See Stephen Holmes, Benjamin Constant and the Making of Modern Liberalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), chap. 5; Tzvetan Todorov, A Passion for Democracy: Benjamin Constant, trans. A. Seberry (London: Algora, 1999), 35–46.

4. Benjamin Constant, “The Freedom of the Ancients Compared with that of the Moderns” [1819], in his Political Writings, 307–328.

5. Marcel Gauchet, “Liberalism’s Lucid Illusion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Constant, ed. Helen Rosenblatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 23–46, 36.

6. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. H. Reeve, 2 vols. (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 2:334.

7. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1:6, 7. Marx’s comment is found in Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right” [c.1842], ed. J. O’Malley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 29–30.

8. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1:3: “The more I advanced in the study of American society, the more I perceived that this equality of conditions is the fundamental fact from which all others seem to be derived and the central point at which all my observations constantly terminated.”

9. Claude Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, trans. D. Macey (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 15.

10. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2:80.

11. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1:272, 273, 255, 278.

12. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1:278, 280, 276.

13. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2:319.

14. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. W. Rehg (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), xlii.

15. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: The Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. T. McCarthy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 356–373.

16. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, trans. T. McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975).

17. Habermas, Between Fact and Norms, 122–123.

18. Jürgen Habermas, “On the Internal Relation between Law and Democracy,” in his The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, trans. C. Cronin and P. de Greiff (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 253–264, 258, 261.

19. Habermas, Between Fact and Norms, 134.

20. See, e.g., Neil Walker, “Constitutionalism and the Incompleteness of Democracy: An Iterative Relationship,” Rechtsfilosophie & Rechtstheorie 39 (2010): 206–233.

21. Frank Michelman, “Constitutional Authorship,” in Constitutionalism: Philosophical Foundations, ed. Larry Alexander (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 64–98, 92.

22. Jürgen Habermas, “Constitutional Democracy: A Paradoxical Union of Contradictory Principles?,” Political Theory 29 (2001): 766–781, 768, 774, 775.

23. Michelman, “Constitutional Authorship,” 87: “Habermas … undoubtedly belongs to the family of liberal political moralists, those who judge political arrangements by asking whether the arrangements sufficiently honor elementary moral entitlements attributed to individuals.”

24. Charles Larmore, “The Foundations of Modern Democracy: Reflections on Jürgen Habermas,” European Journal of Political Philosophy 3 (1995): 55–68, 64, 65.

25. Alessandro Ferrara, “Of Boats and Principles: Reflections on Habermas’s ‘Constitutional Democracy,’ ” Political Theory 29 (2001): 782–791, 786.

26. Jürgen Habermas, “Historical Consciousness and Post-Traditional Identity: The Federal Republic’s Orientation to the West,” in his The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians’ Debate, trans. S. W. Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 249–267. For historical context, see Jan-Werner Müller, Constitutional Patriotism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), chap. 1.

27. Lefort, Democracy and Political Theory, 19 (emphasis in original).

28. See Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), chap. 4.

29. See Jeremy Waldron, Law and Disagreement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), chap. 13.

The Constitution as Civil Religion

1. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right [1821], trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), §§ 200, 236, 258.

2. See Jon Elster and Rune Slagstad, eds., Constitutionalism and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

3. Hans Vorländer, “Integration durch Verfassung? Die symbolische Bedeutung der Verfassung im politischen Integrationsprozess,” in Integration durch Verfassung, ed. Hans Vorländer (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2002), 9–40, 9.

4. See, e.g., Peter Häberle, “The Rationale of Constitutions from a Cultural Science Viewpoint,” in Peter Häberle on Constitutional Theory, ed. M. Kotzur (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2018), 229–256, 229.

5. Rudolf Smend, Verfassung und Verfassungsrecht (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1928). For excerpts, see Arthur J. Jacobson and Bernhard Schlink, eds., Weimar: A Jurisprudence of Crisis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 213–248.

6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract [1762], in The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings, ed. V. Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), book IV, chap. 8.

7. McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 316, 407 (1819), Marshall C.J.

8. Federalist 49 (Madison).

9. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Samuel Kercheval, 12 July 1816,” in Thomas Jefferson: Political Writings, ed. J. Appleby and T. Ball (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 210–217.

10. Justice William Johnson in Elkinson v. Deliesseline 8 Fed. Cas. 593 (1823), cited in Edward S. Corwin, “The Constitution as Instrument and Symbol,” American Political Science Review 30 (1936): 1071–1085, 1075. The sentiment was repeated a century later by George Sutherland who, when nominated in 1922 to the Supreme Court, stated that he believed the Constitution to be a “divinely inspired instrument”: cited in Michael Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1987), 264.

11. Daniel Webster letter to William Hickey, 11 December 1850, cited in Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself, 94.

12. Abraham Lincoln, “On the Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” speech of 27 January 1838, cited in Harvey C. Mansfield Jr., America’s Constitutional Soul (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 31.

13. See Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution (New York: Norton, 2019). Bruce Ackerman’s thesis of “one constitution, three regimes” provides a gloss on this theme: Bruce Ackerman, We the People, vol. 1, Foundations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), chap. 3.

14. Sanford Levinson, Constitutional Faith (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 140.

15. Corwin, “The Constitution as Instrument and Symbol,” 1077–1078, 1076, 1080.

16. Kathleen Sullivan, “Constitutional Amendmentitis,” The American Prospect, 19 December 2001.

17. Irving Kristol, “The Spirit of ’87,” The Public Interest 86 (1987): 3–9, 5.

18. There are too many examples to illustrate the point, especially since the main output is in (overly) long law review articles. By way of monographs, consider only, in addition to Balkin’s book to be examined in this chapter, this selection by Yale Law School professors: Bruce Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Akhil Reed Amar, America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By (New York: Basic Books, 2012); Owen M. Fiss, A War Like No Other: The Constitution in a Time of Terror (New York: New Press, 2015); Paul Kahn, The Reign of Law: Marbury v. Madison and the Construction of America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Robert C. Post, Constitutional Domains: Democracy, Community, Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1995); Jed Rubenfeld, Revolution by Judiciary: The Structure of American Constitutional Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

19. Jack M. Balkin, Constitutional Redemption: Political Faith in an Unjust World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 2–5. See also Robert M. Cover, “Foreword: Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review 97 (1983–1984): 4–68, 34: “I shall use ‘redemptive constitutionalism’ as a label for the positions of associations whose sharply different visions of the social order require a transformational politics that cannot be contained within the autonomous insularity of the association itself.”

20. Balkin, Constitutional Redemption, 6, 11, 10.

21. Balkin, Constitutional Redemption, 18, 19.

22. Balkin, Constitutional Redemption, 51–57.

23. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study in English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

24. Jack M. Balkin, The Cycles of Constitutional Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 4: “In every day, in every way, our Constitution is becoming a better constitution—or at least, we should interpret the Constitution to make it so.”

25. Dieter Grimm, “Integration by Constitution,” in his Constitutionalism: Past, Present, and Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 143–157, 152: “Where other nation states had a sound basis for integration and identity, postwar Germany faced a vacuum.”

26. Dolf Sternberger, Verfassungspatriotismus (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1990), a term he coined in an article in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 23 May 1979.

27. Michael Stürmer, “Geschichte in geschichtslosem Land” [History in a country without history], in Historikerstreit: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung, ed. Rudolf Augstein (Munich: R. Piper, 1987), 36.

28. Jürgen Habermas, “The Finger of Blame: The Germans and Their Memorial,” in his Time of Transitions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 38–50, 43; Habermas, “A Kind of Settlement of Damages: The Apologetic Tendencies in German History Writing,” in Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust, trans. J. Knowlton and T. Cates (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), 30–44.

29. See Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other, trans. C. Cronin and P. de Greiff (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999); Habermas, The Postnational Constellation, trans. M. Pensky (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001).

30. Habermas, “A Kind of Settlement of Damages,” 43.

31. Peter H. Merkl, The Origin of the West German Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), ix, 91, 54, the last citing Klaus-Berto von Dömming, Rudolf Füßlein, and Werner Matz, “Entstehungsgeschichte der Artikel des Grundgesetzes,” Jahrbuch des öffentlichen Rechts der Gegenwart, Neue Folge I, 1 (1951), ed. P. Häberle (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 14–15.

32. Eduard David, Germany’s minister of interior when the National Assembly adopted the Weimar Constitution, cited in Rupert Emerson, State and Sovereignty in Modern Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1928), 231–232.

33. The Basic Law also authorized the Court to suppress extremist movements and ban political parties that seek to impair “the liberal democratic basic order.” Basic Law, arts. 18, 21.

34. Merkl, The Origin of the West German Republic, 176, 172.

35. Merkl, The Origin of the West German Republic, 130.

36. Günter Frankenberg, “Tocqueville’s Question: The Role of a Constitution in the Process of Integration,” Ratio Juris 13 (2000): 1–30, 7–8.

37. Ernst Forsthoff, Der Staat der Industriegesellschaft (Munich: Beck, 1971), 72 (emphasis added), cited in Frankenberg, “Tocqueville’s Question,” 8.

38. Lüth, BVerfGE 7, 198, 205 (1958).

39. Grimm, “Integration by Constitution,” 152.

40. Rudolf Smend, “Das Bundesverfassungsgericht” [1962], in his Staatsrechtliche Abhandlungen und andere Aufsätze, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1994), 581–593, 593, cited in Jo Eric Khushal Murkens, From Empire to Union: Conceptions of German Constitutional Law since 1871 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 156.

41. Matthias Jestaedt, Oliver Lepsius, Christoph Möllers, and Christoph Schönberger, Das entgrenzte Gericht: Eine kritische Bilanz nach sechzig Jahren Bundesverfassungsgericht (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2011); translated as The German Federal Constitutional Court: The Court without Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

42. Peter Häberle, “ ‘The Open Society of Constitutional Interpreters’: A Contribution to a Pluralistic and ‘Procedural’ Constitutional Interpretation” [1975], in Kotzur, Häberle on Constitutional Theory, 129–165, 144.

43. Häberle, “Preambles in the Text and Context of Constitutions” [1979], in Kotzur, Häberle on Constitutional Theory 257–301, 279–280, 300–301 (emphasis in original).

44. Grimm, “Integration by Constitution,” 152.

45. Grimm, “Integration by Constitution,” 152.

46. Bruce Ackerman, The Future of Liberal Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 104–105, 107.

47. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws [1748], trans. A. Cohler, B. Miller, and H. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), book 11, chap. 6.

Toward a Juristocracy

1. Michael Kammen, A Machine That Would Go of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1987), 18, referencing the words of James Russell Lowell.

2. Benjamin Constant, Fragments d’un ouvrage abandonné sur la possibilité d’une constitution républicaine dans un grand pays, ed. H. Grange (Paris: Aubier, 1991), 387: “Le but du pouvoir préservateur est de défendre le gouvernement de la division desgouvernants, et de défendre les gouvernés de l’oppression du gouvernement.”

3. Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution [1867] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 100–101.

4. Lorenz von Stein, The History of the Social Movement in France, 1789–1850 [1850], trans. K. Mengelberg (Totowa, NJ: Bedminster Press, 1964), 228–235, 253–255, esp. 233.

5. The debate was initiated by Kelsen’s 1929 article on constitutional adjudication in which he argued that a constitutional court should be established as guardian of the constitution. Schmitt rebutted that case in a book in 1931, and Kelsen responded in a review of Schmitt’s book. These documents are reproduced in Lars Vinx, The Guardian of the Constitution: Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt on the Limits of Constitutional Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

6. Carl Schmitt, “The Guardian of the Constitution” [1931], in Vinx, The Guardian of the Constitution, 79–173, 156, 157, 167, 172.

7. Hans Kelsen, “The Nature and Development of Constitutional Jurisdiction” [1929], in Vinx, The Guardian of the Constitution, 22–78, 23, 24.

8. Kelsen, “The Nature and Development of Constitutional Jurisdiction,” 28, 69, 73.

9. Schmitt, “The Guardian of the Constitution,” 80, 82. On the U.S. Supreme Court, Schmitt is quoting John R. Commons, Legal Foundations of Capitalism (New York: Macmillan, 1924), 7. On his conception of the jurisdictional state, see Carl Schmitt, Legality and Legitimacy [1932], trans. J. Seitzer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 4–8.

10. Schmitt, “The Guardian of the Constitution,” 133, 132, 91, 95, 168, 171.

11. Lars Vinx, Introduction,” in his The Guardian of the Constitution, 1–21, 1–6. See further Peter C. Caldwell, Popular Sovereignty and the Crisis of German Constitutional Law: The Theory and Practice of Weimar Constitutionalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), chap. 6.

12. Eric Voegelin, The Authoritarian State: An Essay on the Problem of the Austrian State [1936], trans. R. Hein (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999). For Czechoslovakia, see Jiří Hoetzl and V. Joachim, The Constitution of the Czechoslovak Republic (Prague: Édition de la Société, 1920), 10–11.

13. For an overview of the development of constitutional review, see Yaniv Roznai, “Introduction: Constitutional Courts in a 100-Years Perspective and a Proposal for a Hybrid Model of Judicial Review,” Vienna Journal of International Constitutional Law 14 (2020): 355–377. For a study of European development, see Francesco Biagi, Three Generations of European Constitutional Courts in Transition to Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). For analysis of design factors, see Francisco Ramos, “The Establishment of Constitutional Courts: A Study of 128 Democratic Constitutions,” Review of Law & Economics 2 (2006): 103–135.

14. See Alec Stone, The Birth of Judicial Politics in France: The Constitutional Council in Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), chaps. 2–3.

15. Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde, “Constitutional Jurisdiction: Structure, Organization, and Legitimation,” in his Constitutional and Political Theory: Selected Writings, trans. T. Dunlap (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), chap. 8, 197–198.

16. Ran Hirschl, Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Stephen Gardbaum, The New Commonwealth Model of Constitutionalism: Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

17. Hirschl, Towards Juristocracy, 19: “whereas constitutional law cases represented only 2.4 percent of the SCC’s [Supreme Court of Canada] caseload between 1962 and 1971 and 5.5 percent between 1972 and 1981 the proportion of constitutional cases almost quadrupled between 1982 and 1991 to 21.3 percent.” See further Charles Epp, The Rights Revolution: Lawyers, Activists, and Supreme Courts in Comparative Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

18. A dramatic illustration is the case of India, on which see Gautam Bhatia, The Transformative Constitution: A Radical Biography in Nine Acts (Noida, Utter Pradesh: HarperCollins, 2019); Tarunabh Khaitan, “The Indian Supreme Court’s Identity Crisis: A Constitutional Court or a Court of Appeals?,” Indian Law Review 2 (2020): 1–30. But the impact is seen even in the United Kingdom, which adheres most faithfully to the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. See R(Miller) v. Prime Minister / Cherry v. Advocate General [2019] UKSC 41, in which the Supreme Court converted political practices into constitutional principles and asserted their authority to rule on the meaning of the “fundamental principles of our constitutional law.”

19. Hirschl, Towards Juristocracy, 1.

20. C. Neal Tate and Thorbjörn Vallinder, eds., The Global Expansion of Judicial Power (New York: New York University Press, 1995); Epp, The Rights Revolution; Martin Shapiro and Alec Stone Sweet, On Law, Politics, and Judicialization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Hirschl, Towards Juristocracy; Rachel Sieder, Line Schjolden, and Alan Angell, eds., The Judicialization of Politics in Latin America (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2005); Tom Ginsburg and Mila Versteeg, “Why Do Countries Adopt Constitutional Review?,” Journal of Law, Economics & Organization 30 (2014): 587–622; Doreen Lustig and J. H. H. Weiler, “Judicial Review in the Contemporary World—Retrospective and Prospective,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 16 (2018): 315–372.

21. See David S. Law and Mila Versteeg, “The Evolution and Ideology of Global Constitutionalism,” California Law Review 99 (2011): 1153–1257, finding that 90 percent of all variation in the rights-related content of the world’s constitutions are explained as a function of just two variables: the comprehensiveness of the constitution’s rights catalog and the constitution’s aspirational character.

22. Michaela Hailbronner, Traditions and Transformations: The Rise of German Constitutionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), chap. 4.

23. Johan van der Walt, The Horizontal Effect Revolution and the Question of Sovereignty (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014).

24. Katharine G. Young, Constituting Economic and Social Rights: How Rights to Food, Water, Health, Housing and Education are Changing Public Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

25. Kai Möller, The Global Model of Constitutional Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4, 88, 89.

26. Mattias Kumm, “Who Is Afraid of the Total Constitution? Constitutional Rights as Principles and the Constitutionalization of Private Law,” German Law Journal 7 (2006): 341–369, 344.

27. Kumm, “Who Is Afraid of the Total Constitution?,” 344–345, 359.

28. Kumm, “Who Is Afraid of the Total Constitution?,” 368, 346.

29. Kumm, “Who Is Afraid of the Total Constitution?,” 345.

30. Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, AIR 1461 (1973); Minerva Mills Ltd v. Union of India, AIR 1789 (1980); S. R. Bommai v. Union of India, AIR 1918 (1994).

31. Yaniv Roznai, Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments: The Limits of Amendment Powers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 47–70; Silvia Şuteu, Eternity Clauses in Democratic Constitutionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Po Jen Yap and Rehan Abeyratne, “Judicial Self-Dealing and Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments in South Asia,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 19 (2021): 127–148.

32. Ran Hirschl, “The Judicialization of Mega-Politics and the Rise of Political Courts,” Annual Review of Political Science 11 (2008): 93–118, 93, 100–106.

33. Hirschl, Towards Juristocracy, 11, 12.

34. Hirschl, Towards Juristocracy, 13, 11. For a similar argument with respect to the impact of the US constitutional rights movement, see Gerald Rosenberg, The Hollow Hope: Can Courts Bring about Social Change?, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). And despite inclusion of social and economic rights in South Africa’s 1996 Constitution, constitutionalization has signally failed to bring about redistribution: Allister Sparks, Beyond the Miracle: Inside the New South Africa (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2003), chaps. 9–10.

35. Yaniv Roznai suggests that since a trend similar to Israel’s takes place in many other countries around the world, one might wonder why the rights revolution came to Israel only in the 1990s, long after the Ashkenazi liberal elite had lost governmental power (personal communication). On global developments, see David S. Law, “Globalization and the Future of Constitutional Rights,” Northwestern University Law Review 102 (2008): 1277–1350. On the significance of strategic litigation, see Epp, The Rights Revolution, 197–205.

36. Laurence H. Tribe, The Invisible Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 9.

37. Bertolt Brecht, Die Gedichte von Bertolt Brecht in einem Band (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981), 387: “Alle Macht geht vom Volke aus! Aber wo geht sie hin?”

38. Landmark cases include: Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976); McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, 540 U.S. 93 (2003); Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310 (2010); Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013). See also Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela S. Karlan, Richard H. Pildes, and Nathan Persily, The Law of Democracy: Legal Structure of the Political Process, 5th ed. (Eagan, MN: West Publishing, 2016).

39. Ran Hirschl, “The Judicialization of Mega-Politics,” 100; Richard H. Pildes, “The Constitutionalization of Democratic Politics,” Harvard Law Review 118 (2004): 29–154, 32–34.

40. Brunner v. European Union Treaty (Maastricht) [1994] BVerfGE 89, 155; Gauweiler v. Treaty of Lisbon [2009] BVerfG, 2 BvE 2 / 08. See Jo Eric Khushal Murkens, From Empire to Union: Conceptions of German Constitutional Law since 1871 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), chap. 7.

41. Certification of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa 1996 [1996] ZACC 26.

42. Andrew Arato, Post Sovereign Constitution Making: Learning and Legitimacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 79–80.

43. For the most influential expression, see John Hart Ely, Democracy and Distrust: A Theory of Judicial Review (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), presenting a participation-orientated theory that justifies judicial review for the limited purposes of unblocking the channels of political change and facilitating the representation of minorities. For implications beyond the United States, see Stephen Gardbaum, “Comparative Political Process Theory,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 18 (2020): 1410–1457.

44. Pildes, “The Constitutionalization of Democratic Politics,” 54.

45. For the role of courts in bolstering electoral democracy, see Yaniv Roznai, “Who Will Save the Redheads? Towards an Anti-Bully Theory of Judicial Review and Protection of Democracy,” William & Mary Bill Rights Journal 29 (2020): 327–366. But note that regimes with authoritarian tendencies use courts to legitimate measures undermining electoral democracy: see David Landau and Rosalind Dixon, “Abusive Judicial Review: Courts against Democracy,” UC Davis Law Review 53 (2020): 1313–1387.

Integration through Interpretation

1. McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat.), 316, 407 (1819) (emphasis in original).

2. McCulloch v. Maryland, 415, 421.

3. Osborn v. U.S. Bank, 22 U.S. (9 Wheat.), 738, 866 (1824).

4. Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. (1 Cranch), 137 (1803), 176, 177.

5. Consider, e.g., the Ninth Amendment: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” This suggests that certain rights vested in the people (i.e., that form part of the constitution of the state) are prior (in time, if not in authority) to the rights prescribed in the Constitution. Not surprisingly, the consensus of recent American constitutional scholarship now contests that claim: see, e.g., John Hart Ely, Democracy and Distrust: A Theory of Judicial Review (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 34–41.

6. Missouri v. Holland, 252 U.S. 416 (1920), 433.

7. Jeffrey M. Shaman, Constitutional Interpretation: Illusion and Reality (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001), 4.

8. Richard A. Posner, “Democracy and Distrust Revisited,” Virginia Law Review 77 (1991): 641–651, 651. For corroboration, see Laurence H. Tribe, “Soundings and Silences,” in The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective, ed. Rosalind Dixon and Adrienne Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 21–60, 22. On the other hand, perhaps much of the professors’ work is actually undertaken by their student assistants: see, e.g., Tribe, “Soundings and Silences,” 201; Ely, Democracy and Distrust, 76.

9. See Keith Whittington, Constitutional Interpretation: Textual Meaning, Original Intent, and Judicial Review (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 64: “The written Constitution is not to be understood merely as a fundamental law structuring and limiting political powers but also as the sacred text of a community of moral and rational individuals.”

10. Marbury v. Madison, 176.

11. Thomas Jefferson, “From Thomas Jefferson to William Charles Jarvis, 28 September 1820,” Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-1540.

12. Benjamin N. Cardozo, The Nature of the Judicial Process (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1921), 17.

13. Bell v. Maryland, 378 U.S. 226 (1964), Black J (diss.).

14. Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003), 577, 578–579.

15. Marsh v. Chambers, 463 U.S. 783 (1983).

16. Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971).

17. Marsh v. Chambers, 788, 790.

18. Robert C. Post, “Theories of Constitutional Interpretation,” in his Constitutional Domains: Democracy, Community, Management (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), chap. 1.

19. Laurence H. Tribe, “Taking Text and Structure Seriously: Reflections on Free-Form Method in Constitutional Interpretation,” Harvard Law Review 108 (1995): 1221–1303, 1224, 1225, 1235 (emphases in original).

20. Akhil Reed Amar, America’s Constitution: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2005).

21. Ronald Dworkin, Freedom’s Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 2, 10.

22. Laurence H. Tribe, The Invisible Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 10 (emphasis in original).

23. Christopher Eisgruber, Constitutional Self-Government (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 113–114. On the circumstances of its creation, see Michael J. Klarman, The Framers’ Coup: The Making of the United States Constitution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

24. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857), 490 (emphasis in original). For details of the settlement on slavery, see Klarman, The Framers’ Coup, chap. 4.

25. Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (London: Verso, 2011), 12.

26. For an extensive list of citations, see Mark A. Graber, Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15–17. In addition, Tribe, The Invisible Constitution, 111, calls its holding “horrific,” and Balkin argues that it must have been wrong the day it was decided because “to believe otherwise would be to accept facts about our country that are too painful to accept”: Jack M. Balkin, Constitutional Redemption: Political Faith in an Unjust World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 210.

27. Graber, Dred Scott, 251, 18, 167, 251. On the limits of interpretation see, e.g., Madison’s contortions in trying to explain the principle underpinning the provision that assesses slaves as three-fifths for the purpose of allocating legislative representation: Federalist 54.

28. Eisgruber, Constitutional Self-Government, 117.

29. Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory [1928], trans. J. Seitzer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 67, 59.

30. Confusingly, this distinction has also been referred to as that between “interpretivism and noninterpretivism”: Thomas C. Grey, “Do We Have an Unwritten Constitution?,” Stanford Law Review 27 (1975): 703–718; Ely, Democracy and Distrust, chaps. 1–2. It seems now to have fallen from favor: Thomas C. Grey, “The Constitution as Scripture,” Stanford Law Review 37 (1984): 1–25.

31. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method [1960], trans. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall, 2nd rev. ed. (London: Sheen & Ward, 1989). Gadamer shows how the interpretation of any text alters according to the nature of the questions being asked of it. At different times and in different circumstances “people read the sources differently,” and they do so “because they [are] moved by different questions, prejudices, and interests” (at xxxii).

32. See, e.g., Balkin, Constitutional Redemption, 19: “Courts today do not hold the Declaration [of Independence] to be part of the Constitution; they do not read the text of the Declaration as if its clauses had the force of law.… Yet there is no text that is more a part of our Constitution—or our constitution as a people—than the Declaration. Without its ideals our written Constitution would be an empty shell” (emphasis added). See also Balkin, “The Footnote,” Northwestern University Law Review 83 (1989): 275–320.

33. See, e.g., Randy E. Barnett, Restoring the Lost Constitution: The Presumption of Liberty (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Antonin Scalia, A Matter of Interpretation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).

34. Bruce Ackerman, We the People, vol. 1, Foundations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991); We the People, vol. 2, Transformations (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998); We the People, vol. 3, The Civil Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). The third volume was originally intended to be called Interpretations: see vol. 2, 403.

35. Ackerman, We the People, 2:7, 3:36, 1:59.

36. Ackerman, We the People, 2:10, 1:34, 3:28.

37. Ackerman, We the People, 3:30, 2:122.

38. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954).

39. Ackerman, We the People, 2:8, 3:5, 9. Compare Civil Rights Act 1964; Voting Rights Act 1965; Fair Housing Act 1968.

40. Ackerman, We the People, 2:11.

41. Post, “Theories of Constitutional Interpretation,” 29–50.

42. See, e.g., Bruce M. Wilson, “Explaining the Rise of Accountability Functions of Costa Rica’s Constitutional Court,” in Siri Gloppen, Bruce M. Wilson, Roberto Gargarella, Elin Skaar, and Morten Kinander, Courts and Power in Latin America and Africa (New York: Palgrave, 2010), chap. 4; Simon Butt, “The Indonesian Constitutional Court: Implying Rights from the ‘Rule of Law,’ ” in Dixon and Stone, The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective, chap. 10; Gábor Attila Tóth, “Lost in Translation: Invisible Constitutionalism in Hungary,” in Dixon and Stone, The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective, chap. 19; Karl Klare, “Legal Culture and Transformative Constitutionalism,” South African Journal on Human Rights 14 (1998): 146–188.

43. Bruce Ackerman, The Future of Liberal Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 3, 46–47.

44. Bruce Ackerman, Revolutionary Constitutions: Charismatic Leadership and the Rule of Law (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), 363.

45. For both facets at work see Ackerman, The Future of Liberal Revolution, 99–110. Praising the liberal advances quickly made by the Hungarian Constitutional Court, he warns that, without entrenchment, “after the first flush of revolutionary enthusiasm for the rule of law fades, so too will judicial authority” (101) and that “it is only a matter of time before the Court’s abstract resolution of an unending series of burning disputes will generate an overwhelming reaction by parliamentarians, who will try to destroy such a politically exposed institution” (110).

46. See Stephen Gardbaum, “Are Strong Constitutional Courts Always a Good Thing for New Democracies?,” Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 53 (2015): 285–320.

47. Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, The Light That Failed: A Reckoning (London: Allen Lane, 2019), 6, 7, 22.

48. Robert C. Post and Reva B. Siegel, “Democratic Constitutionalism,” in The Constitution in 2020, ed. Jack M. Balkin and Reva B. Siegel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), chap. 3; Post and Siegel, “Roe Rage: Democratic Constitutionalism and Backlash,” Harvard Civil-Rights Civil-Liberties Law Review 42 (2007): 373–433.

49. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. H. Reeve (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), vol. 1, 248: “The law is observed because, first, it is a self-imposed evil, and, secondly, it is an evil of transient duration.”

50. David M. Beatty, The Ultimate Rule of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 159.

51. Kai Möller, The Global Model of Constitutional Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Although constitutional review in the United States does not adopt proportionality analysis as such, the distinction made in levels of scrutiny (strict, minimal, and intermediate) provides a functional equivalent; see Shaman, Constitutional Interpretation, chap. 3. See also Jamal Greene, How Rights Went Wrong (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021), advocating adoption in the United States of this type of proportionality review.

52. Mattias Kumm, “The Idea of Socratic Contestation and the Right to Justification: The Point of Rights-Based Proportionality Review,” Law & Ethics of Human Rights 4 (2010): 142–175.

53. See Moshe Cohen-Eliya and Iddo Parat, “Proportionality and the Culture of Justification,” American Journal of Comparative Law 59 (2011): 463–490.

54. Beatty, The Ultimate Rule of Law, 170.

55. Carl Schmitt, “The Motorized Legislator” [1950], in High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity, ed. Hartmut Rosa and William E. Scheuerman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), chap. 5.

56. Kent Roach, The Supreme Court on Trial: Judicial Activism or Democratic Dialogue (Toronto: Irwin Law, 2001); Roberto Gargarella, “ ‘We the People’ Outside the Constitution: The Dialogic Model of Constitutionalism and the System of Checks and Balances,” Current Legal Problems 67 (2014): 1–47; Aileen Kavanagh, “The Lure and Limits of Dialogue,” University of Toronto Law Journal 66 (2016): 83–120.

A New Species of Law

1. John A. Hawgood, Modern Constitutions since 1787 (London: Macmillan, 1939), 45, 46.

2. Brian Loveman, The Constitution of Tyranny: Regimes of Exception in Spanish America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), 5, 370.

3. Clinton L. Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship: Crisis Government in Modern Democracies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1948), chap. 6.

4. Loveman, The Constitution of Tyranny, 64, 6.

5. Gabriel L. Negretto, “Authoritarian Constitution Making: The Role of the Military in Latin America,” in Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes, ed. Tom Ginsburg and Alberto Simpser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 83–110, 84–85. See further Gabriel L. Negretto, Making Constitutions: Presidents, Parties, and Institutional Choice in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), chaps. 1–3.

6. Juan J. Linz, “The Perils of Presidentialism,” Journal of Democracy 1 (1990): 51–69.

7. See Javier A. Couso, “The Changing Role of Law and Courts in Latin America: From Obstacle to Social Change to a Tool of Social Equity,” in Courts and Social Transformation in New Democracies, ed. Roberto Gargarella, Pilar Domingo, and Theunis Roux (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2006), 61–82.

8. Consider, e.g., the declaration of the military junta that ousted President Allende in Chile in 1973, which stated that the government “has exceeded the bounds of legitimacy by violating the fundamental rights.… For the foregoing reasons the armed forces have taken upon themselves the moral duty which the country imposes upon them of deposing the government, which, although legitimate in the early exercise of power, has since fallen into flagrant illegitimacy” (cited in Loveman, The Constitution of Tyranny, 15). For context, see Roberto Gargarella, Latin American Constitutionalism, 1810–2010: The Engine Room of the Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 127–129. The Chilean Constitution of 1980, adopted by plebiscite under General Pinochet’s regime, currently remains in force, though is presently under review.

9. See F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 3, The Political Order of a Free People (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 124.

10. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws [1748], trans. A. Cohler, B. Miller, and H. Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), book XI, ch. 6: “If the executive power does not have the right to check the enterprise of the legislative body, the latter will be despotic, for it wipe out all the other powers, since it will be able to give to itself all the power it can imagine.… The state will perish when the legislative power is more corrupt than executive power.”

11. Benjamin Constant, “The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation and their Relation to European Civilization” [1814], in his Political Writings, trans. B. Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 43–167, 53–54.

12. Max Weber, Economy and Society, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich, vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1400.

13. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government [1680], ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 2, §§ 160, 210.

14. “Letter from Thomas Jefferson to John C. Breckinridge, 12 August 1803,” in Jefferson, Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1138–1139.

15. See Daniel Farber, Lincoln’s Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

16. Ex parte Merryman, 17 F. Cas. 144 (C.C.D. Md. 1861).

17. Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship, 228.

18. Abraham Lincoln, Message to Congress in Special Session, 4 July 1861, cited in Farber, Lincoln’s Constitution, 194.

19. Prize Cases, 67 U.S. (2 Black) 635, 670 (1863).

20. Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship, 239.

21. Farber, Lincoln’s Constitution, 194, 195 (emphasis in original).

22. See, e.g., Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (New York: Penguin, 2003), 80–81: “The power to rule by decree was only intended for exceptional emergencies. But Ebert, as the Republic’s first President [1919–1925], made very extensive use of this power, employing it on no fewer than 136 occasions.… In the end, Ebert’s excessive use, and occasional misuse, of the Article widened its application to a point where it became a potential threat to democratic institutions.”

23. Carl Schmitt, Dictatorship: From the Origin of the Modern Concept of Sovereignty to Proletarian Class Struggle [1921], trans. M. Hoelzl and G. Ward (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014).

24. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty [1922], trans. G. Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5 (translation modified).

25. Schmitt, Political Theology, 12.

26. Schmitt, Political Theology, 14.

27. Schmitt, Political Theology, 14.

28. Rossiter, Constitutional Dictatorship, chap. 19.

29. Bruce Ackerman, “The Emergency Constitution,” Yale Law Journal 113 (2004): 1028–1091. Compare David Cole, “The Priority of Morality: The Emergency Constitution’s Blind Spot,” Yale Law Journal 113 (2004): 1753–1800, arguing that Ackerman’s proposals provide another mechanism legitimating the use of preventive detention.

30. Oren Gross, “Chaos and Rules: Should Responses to Violent Crises Always be Constitutional?,” Yale Law Journal 112 (2003): 1011–1134.

31. David Dyzenhaus, The Constitution of Law: Legality in a Time of Emergency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 7, 199, 218.

32. Dyzenhaus, The Constitution of Law, 215, 38, 53, 205.

33. Nomi Claire Lazar, States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 13, 5, 113.

34. See my “Reason of State / State of Reason,” in Martin Loughlin, Political Jurisprudence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), chap. 8.

35. Carl J. Friedrich, Constitutional Reason of State (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1957).

36. Dyzenhaus, The Constitution of Law, 3.

37. Lazar, States of Emergency, 17.

38. See, e.g., French Constitution (1958), art. 16: “When the institutions of the Republic, the independence of the nation, the integrity of its territory, or the fulfillment of its international commitments are under grave and immediate threat and when the proper functioning of the constitutional governmental authorities is interrupted, the President of the Republic shall take the measures demanded by these circumstances after official consultation with the Prime Minister, the presidents of the Assemblies, and the Constitutional Council.” After thirty days the Constitutional Council can be asked to determine whether the conditions continue to exist. See also European Convention on Human Rights, art. 15. See Olivier Beaud and Cécile Guérin-Bargues, L’état d’urgence: Une étude constitutionelle, historique et critique (Paris: LGDJ, 2016).

39. See, e.g., Jack Goldsmith, “The Irrelevance of Prerogative Power and the Evils of Secret Legal Interpretation,” in Extra-Legal Power and Legitimacy: Perspectives on the Prerogative, ed. Clement Fatovic and Benjamin A. Kleinerman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 214–231; Ian Ostrander and Joel Sievert, “The Logic of Presidential Signing Statements,” Political Research Quarterly 66 (2013): 141–53; Bruce Ackerman, The Decline and Fall of the American Republic (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 68: “Over the past half-century, two new institutions—the Office of Legal Counsel and the White House Counsel—have vastly increased their constitutional authority. When added together, they form an elite professional corps that produces legal opinions of the highest technical quality … [and] they almost always conclude that the President can do what he wants. Presidents can then publish these respectable-looking opinions to give legal legitimacy to their power grabs.… Call this ‘executive constitutionalism,’ ”

40. See Günter Frankenberg, Political Technology and the Erosion of the Rule of Law: Normalizing the Exception (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2014), chap. 6.

12. The Struggle for Recognition

1. See Liav Orgad, “The Preamble in Constitutional Interpretation,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 8 (2010): 714–738, 716–717.

2. Domenico Lusordo, Liberalism: A Counter-History, trans. G. Elliott (London: Verso, 2011), 205.

3. Rogers M. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 45.

4. Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality (London: André Deutsch, 1977), 39. Note also that almost half of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention owned slaves, and of an estimated colonial population of 4 million, only 160,000 were “active citizens”—that is, possessed the property qualifications needed to elect delegates to the Philadelphia Convention and ratify their work: Eric Foner, The Second Founding (New York: Norton, 2019), 1.

5. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1856), 410, per Taney C.J.: “But it is too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration, for if the language, as understood in that day, would embrace them, the conduct of the distinguished men who framed the Declaration of Independence would have been utterly and flagrantly inconsistent with the principles they asserted, and instead of the sympathy of mankind to which they so confidently appealed, they would have deserved and received universal rebuke and reprobation.”

6. Slaughterhouse Cases, 77 U.S. (10 Wall.) 273 (1869); 83 U.S. 36 (1872); U.S. v. Reese, 92 U.S. 214 (1875); Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883).

7. Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), 544, 551. For context, see Steve Luxenberg, Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson and America’s Journey from Slavery to Segregation (New York: Norton, 2019).

8. See Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), chap. 1.

9. Kluger, Simple Justice, 88: “In 1910, eleven Southern states spent an average of $9.45 on each white child enrolled in their public schools and $2.90 on each black child. And the disparity grew. By 1916, the per-capita outlay for black children dropped a penny to $2.89 but the white per-capita expense rose to $10.32.”

10. Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954), 493–495.

11. Klarman, From Jim Crown to Civil Rights, chap. 6.

12. Brown was followed in the 1960s by constitutional rulings in marriage laws, voting, and criminal procedure: Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967) (laws banning interracial marriage unconstitutional); Baker v. Carr, 369 U.S. 186 (1962) (rationality of electoral districts a constitutional issue); Reynolds v. Sims, 377 U.S. 533 (1964) (electoral districts must be roughly equal); Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436 (1966) (suspects must be informed of their rights); Gideon v. Wainwright (states must provide attorneys to defendants unable to afford one).

13. Kluger, Simple Justice, 758: “A head count [on the tenth anniversary of the Brown decision] showed that only 1.17 percent of black schoolchildren in the eleven states of the Confederacy were attending public school with white classmates.”

14. Brown v. Board of Education, 494.

15. Holding that segregation “has a detrimental effect upon the colored children,” the Court proceeded to justify this finding by citing seven key works by social scientists, the most famous of which is Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (New York: Harper, 1944): Brown v. Board of Education, 494n11.

16. Alexander M. Bickel, The Least Dangerous Branch: The Supreme Court at the Bar of Politics, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 236.

17. See, e.g., Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), showing that, although making up only 13 percent of the population, blacks form 40 percent of the prison population and that one-third of black men have been incarcerated.

18. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What Is Enlightenment?,’ ” in his Political Writings, 2nd ed., ed. H. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54–60, 54.

19. See Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (London: Bodley Head, 1980), 112.

20. Faced with an English claim to pretty much the whole of North America in 1609, “when there were only a handful of settlers clinging to the malarial swamps of the St James River,” in 1627 the French Crown, “at a time when there were only 107 French settlers in Canada, gathered in settlements in Acadia and the St. Lawrence and completely isolated from one another, asserted its rights over a territory which reached from Florida to the Arctic Circle, nearly all of which was uncharted, and virtually none of which was in practice either res nullius or, given the Spanish presence in the South, undiscovered”: Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500–c.1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 80.

21. Calvin’s Case, 77 ER 377 (1608), 397.

22. “The First Charter of Virginia: 10 April 1606,” Avalon Project, Yale Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/VA01.asp.

23. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government [1680], ed. P. Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), vol. 2, § 49

24. Johnson v. M’Intosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823).

25. James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 78.

26. Robert A. Williams Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 221, 325–326.

27. Tully, Strange Multiplicity, 39, 43.

28. See, e.g., John Borrows, Freedom and Indigenous Constitutionalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016).

29. The classic work on the gendered aspect of constitutionalism is Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men; A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1790–1794] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). See further Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988); Beverley Baines and Ruth Rubio-Marín, The Gender of Constitutional Jurisprudence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

30. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, preamble. On the participatory process, see Simone Chambers, “Democracy, Popular Sovereignty and Constitutional Legitimacy,” Constellations 11 (2004): 153–173.

31. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, chap. 2 (rights), chap. 1, § 6 (languages), chap. 12 (customary law), and chaps. 6 and 7 (regional and local government).

32. Constitution of the Republic of Ecuador, 2008, Title II, Rights.

33. On Ecuador, see Carlos de la Torre, “Technocratic Populism in Ecuador,” Journal of Democracy 24 (2013): 33–46; Steven Levitsky and James Loxton, “Populism and Competitive Authoritarianism in the Andes,” Democratization 20 (2013): 107–136; Takis S. Pappas, Populism and Liberal Democracy: A Comparative and Theoretical Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 152–156, 257. On South Africa, see Allister Sparks, Beyond the Miracle: Inside the New South Africa (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2003); James Fowkes, “Choosing to Have Had a Revolution: Lessons from South Africa’s Undecided Constitutionalism,” in Revolutionary Constitutionalism: Law, Legitimacy, Power, ed. Richard Albert (Oxford: Hart, 2020), 355–376, 365–368. For empirical analysis, see Adam Chilton and Mila Versteeg, How Constitutional Rights Matter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

34. Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), chap. 2.

35. Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 9.

36. Indian Constitution, 1947, arts. 15, 16.

37. Gautam Bhatia, The Transformative Constitution: A Radical Biography in Nine Acts (Noida, Uttar Pradesh: HarperCollins, 2019); Gary Jeffrey Jacobsohn and Yaniv Roznai, Constitutional Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), chap. 5.

38. Anuj Bhuwania, Courting the People: Public Interest Litigation in Post-Emergency India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

39. Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed, 3, 38.

40. See, e.g., Menachem Mautner, Law and the Culture of Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), advancing the thesis that Israel’s Supreme Court, traditionally liberalism’s normative beacon, has, through its activism, “lost much stature not only among the Jewish religious group, but also among its own traditional supporters” and this deterioration “means that the Court’s ability to continue playing its traditional role as a stronghold of Israel’s liberalism is very much in jeopardy” (226).

41. Jürgen Habermas, “Citizenship and National Identity,” in his Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), app. II, 491–515.

42. See, e.g., Arend Lijphart, “Constitutional Design in Divided Societies,” Journal of Democracy 15 (2004): 96–109; Sujit Choudhry, ed., Constitutional Design for Divided Societies: Integration or Accommodation? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Hanna Lerner, Making Constitutions in Deeply Divided Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Samuel Issacharoff, Fragile Democracies: Contested Power in the Era of Constitutional Courts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

43. Mara Malagodi, Constitutional Nationalism and Legal Exclusion: Equality, Identity Politics, and Democracy in Nepal (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2013); Nepal Constitution, 2015.

44. The religious parties objected to the adoption of a constitution either because they believed effectively that the Torah was the authoritative guide for the Jewish homeland or because they were concerned that an enforceable bill of rights might be interpreted in a way that would erode special religious privileges. But the dominant secular Ashkenazi elite also were opposed while they were able to rule through parliamentary majorities; their position changed in the 1990s, arguably because of a threat to their dominant position: see Ran Hirschl, Towards Juristocracy: The Origins and Consequences of the New Constitutionalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 50–56; Jacobsohn and Roznai, Constitutional Revolution, 187–194.

45. Basic Law: The Knesset 1985; Declaration of Establishment of the State of Israel, 14 May 1948.

46. The issue of citizenship is complicated because, regarding itself as a country of “repatriation” rather than immigration, Israel does not have citizenship tests, treats the state as made up of its residents, and has no concept of “Israeli nationality” as distinct from ethnic categories. See Liav Orgad, The Cultural Defense of Nations: A Liberal Theory of Majority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 125–129.

47. Mazen Masri, The Dynamics of Exclusionary Constitutionalism: Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State (Oxford: Hart, 2017), 21.

48. Alexander Yacobson and Amnon Rubinstein, Israel and the Family of Nations: The Jewish Nation-State and Human Rights (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2009).

49. Tamar Hostovsky Brandes, “Basic Law: Israel as the Nation State of the Jewish People: Implications for Equality, Self-Determination and Social Solidarity,” Minnesota Journal of International Law 29 (2020): 65–107, 107: “The Law deepens the existing rift in Israeli society and facilitates the already-existing friend-enemy discourse. It reinforces an exclusionary notion of solidarity and negatively affects the prospect of creating all-encompassing solidarity, which includes all of Israel’s citizens.”

50. Amal Jamal, “Israel’s New Constitutional Imagination: The Nation State Law and Beyond,” Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies 18 (2019): 193–220, 193. See also Adam Shinar, Barak Medina, and Gila Stopler, “From Promise to Retrenchment: On the Changing Landscape of Israeli Constitutionalism,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 18 (2020): 714–729; Jacobsohn and Roznai, Constitutional Revolution, 218–223.

51. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. A. Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), pt. III; Ganesh Sitaraman, “Economic Inequality and Constitutional Democracy,” in Constitutional Democracy in Crisis?, ed. Mark A. Graber, Sanford Levinson, and Mark Tushnet (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 533–549; Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 152–153.

52. Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861, in Selected Writings and Speeches of Abraham Lincoln, ed. T. Harry Williams (New York: Hendricks, 1943), 117.

53. See Daniel Weinstock, “Constitutionalizing the Right to Secede,” Journal of Political Philosophy 9 (2001): 182–203; Christopher Heath Wellman, A Theory of Secession: The Case for Political Self-Determination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

54. David Haljan, Constitutionalising Secession (Oxford: Hart, 2014), 14.

55. Reference Re Secession of Quebec [1998], 2 SCR 217, para. 88.

56. Susanna Mancini, “Rethinking the Boundaries of Democratic Secession: Liberalism, Nationalism, and the Right of Minorities to Self-Determination,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 6 (2008): 553–584, 579.

57. See, e.g., South African Constitution, 1996, art. 235: “The right of the South African people as a whole to self-determination, as manifested in this Constitution, does not preclude … recognition of the notion of the right of self-determination of any community sharing a common cultural and language heritage.” Article 72 of the Constitution of the USSR (1977) had asserted the right of every Union Republic to secede from the Soviet Union, but since it was widely recognized to be a façade constitution, no one took that seriously.

13. The Cosmopolitan Project

1. Immanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch” [1795], in his Political Writings, 2nd ed., ed. H. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 93–130, 103.

2. Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” [1784], in his Political Writings, 41–53, 51.

3. Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 514.

4. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 3, 7.

5. Jan Klabbers, Anne Peters, and Geir Ulfstein, The Constitutionalization of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Ronald St. John Macdonald and Douglas M. Johnston, eds., Towards World Constitutionalism: Issues in the Legal Ordering of the World Community (Leiden: Nijhoff, 2005).

6. This was the basis of his debate with Dieter Grimm over a European constitution: Dieter Grimm, “Does Europe Need a Constitution?,” European Law Journal 1 (1995): 282–302; Jürgen Habermas, “Why Europe Needs a Constitution,” New Left Review 11 (2001): 5–26; Jürgen Habermas, “Does Europe Need a Constitution? Response to Dieter Grimm,” in his The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, trans. C. Cronin and P. de Greiff (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 155–161.

7. Habermas, “Why Europe Needs a Constitution,” 6, 9, 16, 17.

8. Jürgen Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union: A Response, trans. C. Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), viii, 6, x, xi. Compare “Why Europe Needs a Constitution,” 8, where Habermas suggests that the Euro would “soon become a unifying symbol in everyday life across the continent.”

9. Jürgen Habermas, “Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace: At Two Hundred Years’ Historical Remove,” in his The Inclusion of the Other, 165–200, 178, 183.

10. Habermas, “Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace,” 181, 190, 199.

11. Jürgen Habermas, “The Postnational Constellation and the Future of Democracy,” in The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, trans. M. Pensky (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 58–112.

12. Jürgen Habermas, “The Constitutionalization of International Law and the Legitimation Problems of a Constitution for World Society,” Constellations 15 (2008): 444–455, 444, 445.

13. Habermas, “The Constitutionalization of International Law,” 448 (emphasis in original).

14. Habermas, “The Constitutionalization of International Law,” 453.

15. See Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union, 37–44 (shared sovereignty as the standard for the legitimation requirements of the Union).

16. This is an extension of Habermas’s argument that in the EU there is a “sharing of constituting power between EU citizens and European peoples”: Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union, 28–37. See also Markus Patberg, Constituent Power in the European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

17. Mattias Kumm, “The Cosmopolitan Turn in Constitutionalism: On the Relationship between Constitutionalism in and beyond the State,” in Ruling the World? International Law, Global Governance, Constitutionalism, ed. Jeffrey L. Dunoff and Joel P. Trachtman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 258–326, 261, 262.

18. Kumm, “The Cosmopolitan Turn,” 272.

19. Kumm initially viewed constituent power as a product of the statist worldview that became redundant in the cosmopolitan paradigm shift, but later embraced Habermas’s dualist view: Mattias Kumm, “Constituent Power, Cosmopolitan Constitutionalism, and Post-Positivist Law,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 14 (2016): 697–711. Compare Neil Walker, “The Return of Constituent Power: A Reply to Mattias Kumm,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 14 (2016): 906–913.

20. Kumm, “The Cosmopolitan Turn,” 305.

21. Kumm, “The Cosmopolitan Turn,” 322–323 (emphases in original).

22. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944), 223, 232.

23. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015).

24. Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 4.

25. F. A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, vol. 3, The Political Order of a Free People (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 149.

26. See Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism: The Classical Tradition [1927], ed. B. B. Greaves (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2005), 113: “But for the liberal, the world does not end at the borders of the state. In his eyes, whatever significance national boundaries have is only incidental and subordinate. His political thinking encompasses the whole of mankind. The starting-point of his entire political philosophy is the conviction that the division of labor is international and not merely national.”

27. Ernst-Ulrich Petersmann, “Human Rights Require Cosmopolitan Constitutionalism and Cosmopolitan Law for Democratic Governance of Public Goods,” Contemporary Readings in Law & Social Justice 5 (2013): 90–119.

28. See Gus Van Harten, Investment Treaty Arbitration and Public Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

29. Signe Larsen, The Constitutional Theory of the Federation and the European Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

30. European Court of Justice, Opinion 1 / 91, Opinion on the draft agreement between the Community and the European Free Trade Association relating to the creation of the European Economic Area: “The EEC Treaty, albeit concluded in the form of an international agreement, none the less constitutes the constitutional charter of a community based on the rule of law. The essential characteristics of the Community legal order are its primacy over the law of the Member States and the direct effect of a whole series of provisions which are applicable to their nationals and to the Member States.” See further Neil Walker, “Big ‘C’ or Small ‘c,’ ” European Law Journal 12 (2006): 12–14.

31. The implications for the standing of European member states are presented in Michael A. Wilkinson, Authoritarian Liberalism and the Transformation of Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).

32. Alexander Somek, The Cosmopolitan Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 25.

33. Basic Law, art. 1(2).

34. Sujit Choudhry, Madhav Khosla, and Pratap Bhanu Mehta, “Locating Indian Constitutionalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 1–16, 5.

35. Networks include the Conference of European Constitutional Courts (established in 1972), the Union of Arab Constitutional Courts and Councils (1997), the Southern African Chief Justice Forum (2003), the Latin American Conference of Constitutional Justice (2005), the Association of Asian Constitutional Courts and Equivalent Institutions (2010), the Conference of Constitutional Jurisdictions of Africa (2011), and the Network of Constitutional Courts and Councils of West and Central Africa (2016). On Europe, see Maartje de Visser and Monica Claes, “Courts United? On European Judicial Networks,” in Lawyering Europe: European Law as a Transnational Legal Field, ed. Bruno de Witte and Antoine Vauchez (Oxford: Hart, 2013), 75–100. On the Asian network, see Maartje de Visser, “We All Stand Together: The Role of the Association of Asian Constitutional Courts and Equivalent Institutions in Promoting Constitutionalism,” Asian Journal of Law and Society 3 (2016): 105–134. On the general trend toward global lawyering, see Neil Walker, Intimations of Global Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), chap. 2.

36. Walter Bagehot, The English Constitution [1867] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 124.

37. Somek, The Cosmopolitan Constitution, 179.

38. Somek, The Cosmopolitan Constitution, 183.

39. Somek, The Cosmopolitan Constitution, 202, 211.

Conclusion

1. Mark DeWolfe Howe, Holmes-Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 475 (Laski, 21.1.23). For Laski’s reasons, see p. 535.

2. Sanford Levinson, Our Undemocratic Constitution: Where the Constitution Goes Wrong (And How We the People Can Correct It) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 6 (emphasis added).

3. Bruce Ackerman, We the People, vol. 3, The Civil Rights Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 23.

4. See, e.g., Noah Feldman, What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Andrew Arato, Constitution Making under Occupation: The Politics of Imposed Revolution in Iraq (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

5. Consider, for example, the case of South Africa, often taken as a model of “aspirational” or “transformational” constitutionalism. Far from entailing a revolutionary shift, it has been shown convincingly that this was a process by which “white elites … gave up their monopoly on political power to preserve their social and economic power”: James Fowkes, “Choosing to Have Had a Revolution: Lessons from South Africa’s Undecided Constitutionalism,” in Revolutionary Constitutionalism: Law, Legitimacy, Power, ed. Richard Albert (Oxford: Hart, 2020), 355–376, 367.

6. Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization: Individualized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences (London: Sage, 2002).

7. For a powerful illustration of the way in which developments in the European Union shaped the formation of constitutional judicial review in France see Daniel Halberstam, “How Europe Brought Judicial Review to France,” in Albert, Revolutionary Constitutionalism, 239–263.

8. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Abacus, 1995), 112: “Taking the world as a whole, there had been perhaps thirty-five or more constitutional and elected governments in 1920 (depending on where we situate some Latin American republics). Until 1938 there were perhaps seventeen such states, in 1944 perhaps twelve out of the global total of sixty-four.”

9. Samuel Issacharoff, “Populism versus Democratic Governance,” in Constitutional Democracy in Crisis?, ed. Mark A. Graber, Sanford Levinson, and Mark Tushnet (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 445–458, 445.

10. John Stuart Mill, “Considerations on Representative Government” [1861], in Three Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 144–423, 382.

11. See, e.g., Freedom House, Freedom in the World, 2020 (Washington, DC: Freedom House, 2021), 10: “More than half of the world’s established democracies deteriorated over the past 14 years. Functioning of government, freedom of expression and belief, and rule of law are the most common areas of decline.”

12. See Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing Out of Western Democracy (London: Verso, 2013), 1: “The age of party democracy has passed.” For a detailed analysis, see Carolien van Ham, Jacques Thomassen, Kees Arts, and Rudy Andeweg, eds., Myth and Reality of the Legitimacy Crisis: Explaining Trends and Cross-National Differences in Established Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 80: “In combination it seems the omens are not good: the future for parties does not seem too bright. Fewer of us are party members; fewer of us vote in elections; of those of us who do vote we are more inconsistent in our voting behaviour.”

13. See Yascha Mounk, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save It (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), chap. 3.

14. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. A. Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014), pt. III; Mounk, The People vs. Democracy, 218: “Since 1986 America’s GDP per capita has increased by 59 percent. The country’s net worth has grown by 90 percent. Corporate profits have soared by 283 percent. But those aggregate numbers hide the distribution of gains. Only 1 percent of total wealth growth from 1986 to 2012 went to the bottom 90 percent of households. By contrast 42 percent went to the top 0.1 percent.”

15. T. Alexander Aleinikoff, “Inherent Instability: Immigration and Constitutional Democracies,” in Graber, Levinson, and Tushnet, Constitutional Democracy in Crisis?, 477–493, 487: “In the United States, the percentage of foreign-born residents (14 per cent) is approaching levels not seen since 1920s.… In Sweden and Austria, the percentage is above 18 per cent; in Germany, 15 per cent; and in France, the United Kingdom and Spain it is over 12 per cent.” Mounk, The People vs. Democracy, 166: “Fears about immigration are now top of mind for voters across Europe.”

16. See, e.g., Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Z. Huq, How to Save a Constitutional Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Graber, Levinson, and Tushnet, Constitutional Democracy in Crisis?; Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Viking, 2018); Mounk, The People vs. Democracy.

17. Benjamin Arditi, Politics on the Edges of Liberalism: Difference, Populism, Revolution, Agitation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), chaps. 2–3; Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (London: Penguin, 2017); Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Populism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

18. Peter Wiles, “A Syndrome, Not a Doctrine: Some Elementary Theses on Populism,” in Populism: Its Meanings and National Characteristics, ed. Ghita Ionescu and Ernest Gellner (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), 166–179.

19. See, e.g., the landmark text of Graber, Levinson, and Tushnet, Constitutional Democracy in Crisis?, which pitches the problem as a crisis of constitutional democracy. The only allusion to the argument I make is by Desmond King and Rogers M. Smith, “Populism, Racism, and the Rule of Law in Constitutional Democracies Today” (Constitutional Democracy in Crisis?, 459–475, 463): “Though scholars of recent populist movements have been commendably attentive to populist attitudes toward constitutionalism and the rule of law, few have explored the possibility that these movements are reactions against the dominant ideology revealed in the spate of drafting of new constitutions that occurred around the world in the last quarter century.” For nuanced analysis, see Neil Walker, “Populism and Constitutional Tension,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 17 (2019): 515–535; Paul Blokker, “Populism as a Constitutional Project,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 17 (2019): 535–553.

20. Ginsburg and Huq, How to Save a Constitutional Democracy, chaps. 6–7.

21. Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, The Light that Failed: A Reckoning (London: Allen Lane, 2019), 22.

22. Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), x: “What is involved in such a disdainful rejection [of populism] is, I think, the dismissal of politics tout court, and the assertion that the management of community is the concern of an administrative power whose source of legitimacy is a proper knowledge of what a ‘good’ community is.” See also Chantal Mouffe, For a Left Populism (London: Verso, 2018).

23. Nadia Urbinati, Me the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 204: “The challenges to constitutional democracy come from two opposite sides: the oligarchic few, who already control the decision-making process; and the popular many, who claim that the only way they can redress the inequality of their power is by claiming the priority of the majority over all other parts of society.”

24. Norberto Bobbio, “Democracy and Invisible Power,” in his The Future of Democracy, trans. R. Griffin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), chap. 4.

25. See, e.g., the ongoing dispute between the German Federal Constitutional Court and the Court of Justice of the European Union over the legality of the actions by the European Central Bank, first in its response to the Euro crisis (Gauweiler: BVerfG, Judgment, 21 June 2016, 2 BvR 2728 / 13; ECJ case C-62 / 14) and, more recently, its Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (Weiss: BVerfG, Judgment, 5 May 2020, 2 BvR 859 / 15; ECJ case C-493 / 17). These disputes show how the proportionality principle is used to mask policy preferences, the illusion that strict legality could prevail over “reason of state” considerations, and the inability of courts now to decline to assert jurisdiction under a political question doctrine. See Marco Dani, Agustin Menendez, Eduardo Chiti, Joana Mendes, Harm Schepel, and Michael Wilkinson, “ ‘It’s the Political Economy!’ A Moment of Truth for the Eurozone and the EU,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 19 (2021): 309–327.

26. See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948): “The development of economic rationalism is partly dependent on rational technique and law” (26). “The spirit of capitalism had to fight its way to supremacy against the whole world of hostile forces.… The most important opponent with which it had to struggle was traditionalism” (56, 59). Evolving from “the hard legalism and the active enterprise of bourgeois-capitalistic entrepreneurs” (139), we see “the continued life of the Word, not as a written document, but as the force of the [spirit of constitutionalism] working in daily life,” which speaks directly to the individual, works through “the inner light of continual revelation,” and flourishes through “this invisible Church of those illuminated by the spirit” (147; emphasis in original). “For the last stage it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved’ ” (182).

27. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. H. Reeve, vol. 2 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 318.

28. Nadia Urbinati, Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).