In this contribution I provide an interpretation of Stone Sweet’s and Ryan’s cosmopolitan legal order in conjunction with a certain reconstruction of the Kantian cosmopolitan rationale. Accordingly, I draw attention to the connection between the notion of a general (cosmopolitan) will in Kant’s reinterpretation of Rousseau and the role of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) as an ‘interpreter’ of such will. I conclude by suggesting that the opportunity of extending the CLO also accounts for a variety of other poliarchical regimes that, taken as a whole, illustrate the landscapes of contemporary global constitutionalism.

Kant is regarded as one of the most influential cosmopolitan thinkers. Indeed his legacy still influences the contemporary legal and philosophical debate on this issue. But what is the Kantian conception of cosmopolitan law? In which terms does it arise out of his notion of a ‘right to visit’? How does it contribute to the construction of a ‘cosmopolitan constitution’? In this article the view is advanced that Kant was a legal constructivist. The argument assumes also that within Kant’s view of an ‘original community of interaction’, the justification of a cosmopolitan notion of authority allows exercises of freedom under a general scheme of right. Kant’s ‘cosmopolitan constitution’ depends therefore upon such rationale, as well as on the jurisdictional link that the right to visit determines in allowing individuals with the possibility to have a ‘place on earth’.