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\"Rainer Forst is a leading German political philosopher and was named \"the most important political philosopher of his generation\" upon his 2012 receipt of the Leibniz Prize. This book brings together discussion from political philosophy, constitutional theory, and legal philosophy to examine Forst's theory of justice, paying special attention to the application of his moral theory to legal fields. Forst then responds to his interlocutors in a concluding chapter. The book is structured from the general to the specific, and begins by examining Forst's \"right to justification\" as the basis for justice. This right is in the second section extended to the realm of constitutional theory. The third section addresses justification and proportionality within constitutional law. The concluding section sees Forst respond to the foregoing chapters\"-- Provided by publisher.

What is the material context of constitutional order? The purpose of this paper is to offer an answer to that question by sketching a theory of the material constitution. Moving beyond the interwar constitutional theories of Heller and Mortati, the paper outlines the four ordering forces of the material constitution: political unity; a set of institutions; social relations, and fundamental political objectives. These forces constitute the substance and dynamic of constitutional ordering, in internal relation with the formal constitution. Because these ordering forces are multiple, and in tension with one another, there is no single determining factor of constitutional development. Neither is order as such guaranteed. The conflict that characterises the modern human condition might but need not be internalised by the process of constitutional ordering. The theory of the material constitution offers an account of the basic elements of this process as well as its internal dynamic.

\"This book explains why contemporary liberal democracies are based on historical templates rather than revolutionary reforms; why the transition in Europe occurred during a relatively short period in the nineteenth century; why politically and economically powerful men and women voluntarily supported such reforms; how interests, ideas, and pre-existing institutions affected the reforms adopted; and why the countries that liberalized their political systems also produced the Industrial Revolution. The analysis is organized in three parts. The first part develops new rational choice models of (1) governance, (2) the balance of authority between parliaments and kings, (3) constitutional exchange, and (4) suffrage reform. The second part provides historical overviews and detailed constitutional histories of six important countries. The third part provides additional evidence in support of the theory, summarizes the results, contrasts the approach taken in this book with that of other scholars, and discusses methodological issues\"-- Provided by publisher.

All discussants of this book symposium on the monograph Constitutional Imaginaries address different aspects of constitutionalism beyond national and international limits and engage with the concepts of transnational law and global society to test and contest the book’s central argument according to which specific European constitutional imaginaries are internally constituted by different social systems and therefore paradoxically represent the unity of European society through their specific semantics. In this rejoinder, I focus on some overlapping themes, namely the process of social differentiation, its impact on both social and legal pluralism, and the paradox of legitimation in societal constitutionalism to respond to their comments and criticisms.

Abstract This article analyzes the political economy of credit, drawing on emerging legal scholarship that questions the neoclassical economic view of money as a neutral tool and central banks as institutions in charge of price stability, operating solely on technical grounds. In stark contrast, the experience of Chile’s socialist Unidad Popular government (1970-1973) is a case where the attempt to transform the sources of monetary creation and assert public control over credit and the banking system received intense opposition that tested the limits of legality. The Chilean path to socialism envisioned a revolutionary transformation within the framework of the rule of law. Early successes in reshaping the monetary structure-leveraging private law mechanisms such as freedom of contract, private property rights, and the legal powers granted under the presidential system-ultimately precipitated a constitutional crisis, foreshadowing the military coup on September 11, 1973. In revisiting this pivotal period, this paper draws on the insights of the constitutional theory of money that emphasizes its political dimensions and the crucial role of law in shaping the economic and social orders.

The article offers a conceptual perspective on the relevance of the theory of state organs developed in the 19th century in Germany for contemporary state theory in Latvia. The article treats the genesis of the understanding of the state institutions since the regaining of independence in the 1990s. Taking into account the phenomenon of “flood of laws” progressing today, one of its manifestations is the constant discussion of amendments to the constitution, including adding new institutions to the constitution. In the absence of serious doctrinally based arguments and filters strengthened by legal culture, the legislator can use the power granted to it to amend the constitution without sufficiently comprehensively considering and amending the well-functioning mechanism of checks and balances between the three branches of power, which was established before World War II.

In an international social rights debate disproportionately focused on English-speaking countries, redundant emphasis has been placed on justiciability. While constitutionalization does challenge stable relations between powers, especially in the post-colonial and developing world, solid insights for a workable interpretative method can be derived from continental Europe, where the difficulties typically associated with justiciability have long been settled. The constitutions of Italy, Germany, and Portugal take socioeconomic democracy seriously, tempering socialist claims and refuting libertarian stances, and have managed to spur a legitimate judicial increment of substantive equality. Through a threefold comparison, this paper describes the peculiarities of these fundamental texts across the spectrum of possible constitutional design choices, and draws from comparative constitutional caselaw to highlight a cross-national convergence on a set of interpretative standards. These blend together a strong safeguard of legislative discretion with justiciable minimal guarantees, and a value-assertive orientation of balancing coextensive with the integrationist function of constitutionalized social and economic rights.

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.

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.

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.