Constitutional Legitimacy

Interests, Legitimacy, and Constitutional Choice:

In this paper we address the issue of the steady and significant increase in the scope of the codecision procedure and the motivation of the member states for increasing the power of the European Parliament. Using a rational choice framework we argue that the important variable in the assessment of the changes in the decision making procedures is the expected benefit from the various legislativ...

The Rule of Law and the Legitimacy of Constitutional Democracy

The rule of law is a cornerstone of contemporary constitutional democracy1 as was underscored by its role in cementing the recent transitions from authoritarian or totalitarian regimes2 to constitutional democracy in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.3 In the broadest terms, the rule of law requires that the state only subject the citizenry to publicly promulgated laws, that the state’s legislative ...

Constitutional Theory, Constitutional Culture

Constitutional theorists and other constitutional commentators make heavy use of a paradigm that mistakes certain aspects of our current constitutional decisionmaking process for inherent parts of our constitutional structure and ignores other important aspects of that process entirely. These distortions and elisions raise concerns about the accuracy of much descriptive constitutional commentar...

Constitutional Economics/Constitutional Politics

Why does the treatment of American constitutional politics presented in We the People depart so radically from models of constitutional deliberation developed in the type of constitutional economics pioneered by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock? The paper defines three premises that account for the divergence, and concludes by proposing an inquiry into constitutional design that requires insig...

The Japanese Constitution As Law and the Legitimacy of the Supreme Court's Constitutional Decisions: A Response to Matsui