Abstract: This dissertation develops a theory of post-national constitutional law, sovereignty, and solidarity that draws on conceptions of identity and time from across Anglo-American legal theory, continental political and social thought, and European jurisprudence. It attends to how post-national law

This dissertation develops a theory of post-national constitutional law, sovereignty, and solidarity that draws on conceptions of identity and time from across Anglo-American legal theory, continental political and social thought, and European jurisprudence. It attends to how post-national law might gather together texts, discourses, practices, and institutions in a shared effort to transform the modernist logic of nationalistic sovereignty as it thus far remains reflected in juridical forms and political life. It approaches this central task along two parallel paths: how law can retain democratic legitimacy beyond the nation-state, and how law can inform a transfigurative post-national politics responsive to diversity and to the excluded other. Taking the constitutional development of the European Union as a point of departure and main object of inquiry, I argue that post-national law’s legitimacy and motivating power turn on its attunement to time. It is through sensitivity to the dimensions of time and to the narrative structure of constitutional claims that postnational law holds together its seemingly divergent ambitions: shared commitment and self-decentering plurality. Law’s narrative illuminates both the heterogeneity and contingency of political identity inherited from the past and the particular possibilities open for politics in the future. Because law makes intelligible both self-insufficiency and political imagination, it yields a critical distance from one’s established political community without too quickly abstracting from the ties of belonging needed for situated political judgment. Law thereby traces over time a particular form of creative freedom essential for making sense of the postnational project and its emancipatory demands. Grounding my argument is the concern, developed in the introductory chapter, that contemporary functionalist and technocratic modes of Europe’s supranational integration pose the danger of ‘thin constitutionalism’: of law unable either to affirm the democratic political autonomy of citizens or to disclose the broader social, normative, and symbolic stakes of post-nationality as a political project. The second chapter is framed by the pressing need—in light of the crises in austerity Greece and Europe’s failure to respond to the claims of refugees—for reviving post-national solidarity as a legal principle and offers an integrated critique of Habermas’s discourse theory of law and his ‘constitutional patriotism’ as a rich but