Despite the growing influence of constitutional rights over the regulation of horizontal (private) relations, many aspects of this trend remain under-theorized. This article criticizes four ideal-typical constitutional horizontality models for failing to accommodate moral reasons that must shape this regulatory practice: the state action model ignores basic consequentialist aspects of political morality; the direct application model ignores basic relational aspects of interpersonal morality; the strong indirect model recognizes both but subordinates the latter to the former; and the partitioned indirect model recognizes both but separates them too strongly. This article claims that a composite indirect model, which reflects basic features of the common law, can better realize constitutional rights through private law in conditions of moral pluralism: it can expose private law to constitutional rights-based and reform-oriented scrutiny without ignoring, eroding, or distorting the unique normativity of private relations and practices or their underlying values.

This paper analyses five constitutional developments in Central and Eastern Europe that can impact the domestic implementation of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). Using Czechia, Poland and Slovenia as examples, the paper highlights four potential drivers, namely: (1) the process of constitutionalizing human rights; (2) the proliferation of the doctrine of horizontal effect of constitutional rights; (3) the constitutional legitimacy of state intervention in the free market economy; and (4) the mechanism of judicial review. Furthermore, the author underlines the most significant challenge, which is increasing resistance to international norms in some countries, e.g., Poland. The paper concludes that the jurisprudence of the constitutional courts can facilitate the domestic implementation of the UNGPs, particularly Pillars I (State duty to protect human rights) and III (access to remedy).

This article analyses the main debates over the application of the Charter to disputes between private parties and assesses the ways in which the case law over the last ten years has responded to them. The article goes on to propose an alternative schema, whereby horizontality can be understood as a structural principle of EU fundamental rights adjudication on its own terms, rather than as an extension of the direct effect doctrine. It is argued that a self-standing principle of horizontality with equally valuable—yet operationally distinct—direct, indirect, and state-mediated manifestations, could respond more coherently to the conceptual, procedural, and remedial challenges displayed in the case law.

International law sometimes fails to regulate cross-border affairs due to a lack of consent or pace among the states. As a consequence, transnational governance arrangements, which are established by contract mainly among non-state actors, step in to fill the gap. The arrangement that allocates domains on the Internet offers the most sophisticated example to date. The present article argues that a new approach to the horizontal effect of constitutional rights may both account for the emergence of such arrangements and offer a solution to the problem of their legitimacy. According to this understanding, constitutional rights at the same time enable and restrict transnational regulation. In this way, they guarantee a comprehensive protection of freedom under conditions of globalisation. As long as transnational governance arrangements are not able to generate constitutional rights of their own, however, the national legal orders must complement them. Hence, the legitimacy of law in world society may only be ensured through a dialectical process of internal and external constitutionalisation, resulting from the interaction of its various constituents.

Human contrast sensitivity for narrowband Gabor targets is suppressed when superimposed on narrowband masks of the same spatial frequency and orientation (referred to as overlay suppression), with suppression being broadly tuned to orientation and spatial frequency. Numerous behavioral and neurophysiological experiments have suggested that overlay suppression originates from the initial lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) inputs to V1, which is consistent with the broad tuning typically reported for overlay suppression. However, recent reports have shown narrowly tuned anisotropic overlay suppression when narrowband targets are masked by broadband noise. Consequently, researchers have argued for an additional form of overlay suppression that involves cortical contrast gain control processes. The current study sought to further explore this notion behaviorally using narrowband and broadband masks, along with a computational neural simulation of the hypothesized underlying gain control processes in cortex. Additionally, we employed transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) in order to test whether cortical processes are involved in driving narrowly tuned anisotropic suppression. The behavioral results yielded anisotropic overlay suppression for both broadband and narrowband masks and could be replicated with our computational neural simulation of anisotropic gain control. Further, the anisotropic form of overlay suppression could be directly modulated by tDCS, which would not be expected if the suppression was primarily subcortical in origin. Altogether, the results of the current study provide further evidence in support of an additional overlay suppression process that originates in cortex and show that this form of suppression is also observable with narrowband masks.