The aim of this article is to open a new way of understanding corruption by examining its place within the law and culture of the European semi-periphery, with a focus on inter-war Romania. My intention is to operate a twofold displacement of the analysis of the anti-corruption and the status of constitutional practice in this context. First, I aim to reposition the question of political corruption within a jurisprudential and legal historical context. In this way I inquire what is the legal theoretical importance of political corruption in a post-dependency context? In other words, what can the representation of corruption entail for law, and for a particular legal historical trajectory within the European periphery. Second, I move towards exploring the context of the inter-war period as well as the discursive construction of political corruption within the law and through the fascist criticism levelled against it.

Questions concerning border closures during pandemics often focus on international borders or rights-based considerations. Closures of internal borders in federal countries, such as Canada, raise independent concerns regarding who can close internal borders when. Those questions are not exhausted by rights-based considerations and cannot be resolved using brute empirical measures. They instead implicate the nature and ends of federalism. This text uses the case of internal border restrictions in Canada during COVID-19 to explore whether the kinds of closures that took place there can be justified on federalism grounds. It argues that the case for provinces being able to unilaterally enact interprovincial border closures in federal countries, as observed in Canada during COVID-19, do not withstand scrutiny. It attends to possible justifications for federalism to demonstrate that the best arguments for federalism do not support provincial control over borders that justify provinces possessing, let alone exercising, unilateral authority to close interprovincial borders to persons residing in other provinces.

In the immediate post-war period, a set of thinkers, most notably Jacques Maritain, developed influential natural law theories of constitutional democracy. The central tenet of the natural law approach to the post-war settlement was that, without the type of foundational understanding of the constitutional system it was proposing, the new democratic political institutions would relapse into totalitarianism. In response to this natural law challenge, Hans Kelsen sought to explicate and defend a self-consciously secular and relativistic understanding of the basis of constitutional democracy. This article will examine the debate between the Kelsenian and the natural law view of constitutional democracy. The debate raises questions of foundational importance, and a number of issues are of particular concern in the present global context. These issues concern the role of moral pluralism and its relevance to the structure of constitutional democracy, and the relationship between universal values and the common good of particular communities.

Digital constitutionalism is a strand of scholarship that focuses on the relationship between constitutional law and the socio-legal challenges posed by the digital revolution. However, such scholarship often builds uncritically on the tenets of liberal, state-centred constitutional theory, giving rise to contradictions between analytical starting points and normative aspirations. Against this background, with an approach inspired by societal constitutionalism, this article engages with digital constitutionalism as both an object and a means of critique. As an object, digital constitutionalism is assessed in the light of its contradictions. As a means, digital constitutionalism is used to assess the limits of traditional, liberal, state-centred constitutional theory. In other words, societal constitutionalism is the theoretical lens used to both deconstruct and reconstruct digital constitutionalism according to its normative aspirations. The article has three main goals: first, linking different discourses within digital constitutionalism, highlighting its critical potential; second, advancing some proposals based on such reflections; and third, bringing digital constitutionalism closer to the broader global constitutionalism discourse. After an overview of societal constitutionalism, the article focuses on digital constitutionalism’s definition and three functionally differentiated systems: politics, economy and law. For each of them, it highlights analytical and normative gains deriving from the societal constitutionalism-based approach as well as policy proposals to be developed further.

This Article discusses Emilios Christodoulidis’s The Redress of Law as a major contribution to contemporary critical constitutional theory, with a focus on its relationship with other lines of critical thought; with systems theory and societal constitutionalism; and with legal pluralism and the global constitutionalism discourses. It argues that the most valuable contribution of The Redress of Law lies in its capacity to innovate current theoretical discourses, too often closed in on their conceptual assumptions, in turn modelled on liberal political theory.

This paper builds on the work of several exceptional scholars from the disciplines of philosophy, law, and history. My central aim is to introduce and explicate an idea closely related to (and derivative of) the concept of rights talk, a concept I call ‘constitutional emotivism’. By drawing upon scholars including Mary Ann Glendon, Jamal Greene, A.J. Ayer, and Alasdair MacIntyre, I aim to gather the conceptual threads that I trace through their work which together form the idea of constitutional emotivism. In a sentence, constitutional emotivism is the conflation of moral disagreements with constitutional rights grievances. When this conflation occurs, rights conflicts that never needed to occur in the first place reinforce rights talk and its uncompromising nature.

Stefan Eich’s The Currency of Politics reconstructs and contextualises the monetary understanding of some of the most renowned political thinkers in history. By contextualising each author’s conceptualisation (subjective perception) against their respective contemporary monetary frameworks (objective institutional dimension), Eich elaborates a narrative composed of cumulative layers leading to a double conclusion: that money is political at its core, and that current policies are actively de-politicizing money. These relevant findings are the point of departure of a reflection on the role that law, and constitutional theory in particular, must play in the configuration of Europe’s common currency to overcome some of the most acute difficulties the process of integration is currently experiencing. If the triad law, money and public discourse is supposed to articulate social life in the polity, European monetary integration has neutralised them by neglecting the relevance of one of their key features: civic reciprocity. Reactivating the three mechanisms of social integration requires an exercise of constitutional imagination able to integrate interdisciplinary knowledge about money within an institutional framework able to prevent the concentration of unlimited power in unaccountable institutions and to promote and fully exploit the democratic potential of money.

Extensive urbanization is one of the most significant demographic and geopolitical phenomena of our time. Yet, with few exceptions, constitutional theory has failed to turn its attention to this crucial trend. In particular, the burgeoning constitutional literature aimed at addressing phenomena such as democratic backsliding, constitutional retrogression, and populist threats to judicial independence and the rule of law has failed to respond to the significance of place as an emerging cleavage in contemporary politics. An alarming disconnect has emerged between constitutionalism's overwhelmingly statist (or Westphalian) outlook and the reality of geographically localized concentration of worldviews, policy preferences, and political identities. In this essay, I identify urban agglomeration and the accompanying resurgence of the urban-rural divide as posing a critical challenge to liberal constitutional democracy, and argue that the time is ripe to pay closer attention to the spatial dimension of constitutional governance and its impact on the rise of anti-establishment political resentment. To that end, in the essay's final part I identify several areas of constitutional law and theory that appear to hold some intellectual promise in thinking creatively about mitigating the urban-rural divide, and about the mounting urban challenge more generally.

The author first presents an uncritical user’s guide to the book, then discusses why Witte, Nichols, and Garnett should consider including key chapters of the story of US religious liberty in the next edition. The author then deconstructs the normative and methodological assumptions of the book.

The last few decades have seen a proliferation of constitutional institutions, especially in the Global South, that do not neatly fit within any of three traditional branches of the state. These supposedly ‘fourth branch’ institutions may include electoral commissions, human rights commissions, central banks, probity bodies such as anti-corruption watchdogs, knowledge institutions such as statistics bureaus and census boards, information commissioners, auditors general, attorneys general and so on. In this paper, I will argue that some of these new institutions are best understood as “guarantor institutions”. I will show that in a given political context, a guarantor institution is a tailor-made constitutional institution, vested with material as well as expressive capacities, whose function is to provide a credible and enduring guarantee to a specific non-self-enforcing constitutional norm (or any aspect thereof).

Section I explains why polities need credible and enduring guarantees for specific norms, and claims that the expertise, independence, and accountability of guarantor institutions are likely to be key ingredients that determine their effectiveness in serving that purpose. It also argues that constitutional entrenchment of the guarantor institution is entailed in the independence requirement. Section II shows that in order to credibly and enduringly guarantee a norm, certain primary and secondary duties need to be discharged by relevant actors in relation to the norm's content as well as its impact. It further argues that while some of these duties may be performed by institutions that possess expressive capacity alone (roughly, the capacity to speak, express, communicate), others require material capacity (i.e. the physical capacity to effect material changes in the world). Guarantor institutions, unlike integrity institutions, can shoulder primary as well as secondary duties. Furthermore, they are typically vested with expressive as well as material capacities, which is key to their classification-defying hybridity. Section III argues that guarantor institutions are constitutionalised in two respects: the norm they seek to guarantee is constitutional, and the institution itself has constitutional status. What matters for a norm or institution to be constitutional is that it is entrenched, i.e. protected from change from the ordinary political and legal processes of the polity to some extent. It is their doubly constitutional character that distinguishes guarantor institutions from ordinary regulators.

Section IV explains how some constitutional norms are non-self-enforcing, in the sense that powerful actors are likely to have the will as well as the capacity to frustrate or erase them. It also shows that the three traditional branches, whether acting severally or jointly, cannot provide a credible and enduring guarantee to all non-self-enforcing constitutional norms. Hence the need for constitutional guarantor institutions. Section V highlights that guarantor institutions are typically tailor-made to guarantee specific constitutional norms. Their specificity has important consequences for their internal design and their mode of functioning, which distinguish them from key institutions in the three traditional generalist branches. Section VI concludes. Attention to guarantor institutions by constitutional scholars may help the discipline escape its blinkered worldview, which sees judicial review as the only game in constitution-town.