Chilean Insights for Progressive Constitutionalism

Should Progressive Constitutionalism Embrace Popular Constitutionalism?

There are two conceptions of progressive constitutionalism explored in this Symposium. The first is of progressive constitutionalism as, first and foremost, a programmatic agenda, focused on how progressives’ “distinctive constitutional vision may best be transmuted into claims of constitutional law.”1 To the extent that this constitutional vision entails only a set of policy preferences (e.g.,...

Progressive Constitutionalism and Alternative Movements in Law

Political constitutionalism

For ‘legal constitutionalists’, written constitutions, constitutive of the legal and political system, superior to other legislation, entrenched against change, and enumerating justiciable rights, guarantee equal respect and concern for all citizens. Judicial review is thus an essential support of democracy. In this book, Richard Bellamy offers a robust argument against this view of constitutio...

Critical Constitutionalism Now

In the fall of 1999, Mark Tushnet published a celebrated foreword to the Supreme Court edition of the Harvard Law Review arguing that the Rehnquist Court’s decisions could be understood as part of an era marked by divided government and sharply reduced ambitions for the transformative potential of constitutional law.1 Almost exactly two years later, on September 11, 2001, airplanes crashed into...

Hume's Second-Best Constitutionalism

In the economic and political science literature on constitutional choice and constitutional design, David Hume is almost invariably associated with a master principle of design that is congenial to rationalactor approaches. I shall call this the knavery principle. As Hume put it, "in contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controuls of the constitution, every man...