Constitutions are no longer exclusively national projects, but increasingly result from broader transnational processes that form a transnational legal order.
Transnational Legal Orders offers an empirically grounded approach to the emergence of legal orders beyond nation-states that reframes the study of law and society.
Constitution making is a topic of increasing scholarly and practical interest. Focusing on a set of important case studies, yet also featuring classic articles on the subject, this volume is a critical assembly of theoretical literature. Ensuring wide geographic and historical coverage, and including an original introduction by the editors, this collection provides an essential overview of the myriad of circumstances in which constitutions can be made.
This book contributes new theoretical insight and in-depth empirical analysis about the relationship between transnational legality, state change and the globalisation of markets. The role of transnational economic law in influencing and reorganising national systems of governance evidences the constitutional dimensions of global capitalism: the power to institute new rules and limits for national states. This form of new constitutionalism does not undermine the state but transforms it by eroding national capacities and implanting global alternatives. While leading scholars in the field have emphasised the much-needed value of case studies, there are no studies available which consider the cumulative impact of multiple axes of transnational legal ordering on the national state or its constitution. This monograph addresses this empirical gap, whilst expanding the theoretical scope of the field. Mongolia’s recent transformation as a mineral-exporting country provides a rare opportunity to witness economic and legal globalisation in process. Based on careful empirical analysis of national law and policy-making, the book traces the way distinctive processes of transnational legal ordering have reorganised and reframed the governance of Mongolia’s mining sector, specifically by redistributing state power in relation to the market, sub-national administrations and civil society. The book investigates the role of international financial institutions, multinational corporations and non-governmental organisations in normative transmission, as well as the critical role of national actors in embedding transnational investment norms within the domestic legal and policy environment. As the book demonstrates, however, the constitutional ramifications of transnational legal ordering extend beyond the mining regime itself into more fundamental questions of the trajectory of state transformation, institutionally and ideologically. The book will be of interest to scholars of international law, global governance and the political economy of development.
How can fragmented, divided societies that are not immediately compatible with centralised statehood best adjust to state structures? This book employs both comparative constitutional law and comparative politics, as it proposes the idea of a 'constituent process', whereby public participation in constitution making plays a positive role in state building. This can help to foster a sense of political community and produce a constitution that enhances the legitimacy and effectiveness of state institutions because a liberal-local hybrid can emerge to balance international liberal practices with local customary ones. This book represents a sustained attempt to examine the role that public participation has played during state building and the consequences it has had for the performance of the state. It is also the first attempt to conduct a detailed empirical study of the role played by the liberal-local-hybrid approach in state building.
Post 1960, all colonies enjoyed the right to sculpt their own constitutions without international assistance. Yet, from 1960-2018, over poor 40 sovereign states have adopted with United Nations Constitutional Assistance (UNCA) the Western liberal constitution. Why? A comprehensive study on UNCA, this book shows that based on the UN's official statements, UNCA works ostensibly to 'modernise' poor states. However, this results in an investor-friendly environment that largely benefits powerful transnational interests, only to secure debt-relief. Thus, political control that they experienced when they were colonies, continues in this post-colonial era.
Transconstitutionalism is a concept used to describe what happens to constitutional law when it is emancipated from the state, in which can be found the origins of constitutional law. Transconstitutionalism does not exist because a multitude of new constitutions have appeared, but because other legal orders are now implicated in resolving basic constitutional problems. A transconstitutional problem entails a constitutional issue whose solution may involve national, international, supranational and transnational courts or arbitral tribunals, as well as native local legal institutions. Transconstitutionalism does not take any single legal order or type of order as a starting-point or ultima ratio. It rejects both nation-statism and internationalism, supranationalism, transnationalism and localism as privileged spaces for solving constitutional problems. The transconstitutional model avoids the dilemma of 'monism versus pluralism'. From the standpoint of transconstitutionalism, a plurality of legal orders entails a complementary and conflicting relationship between identity and alterity: constitutional identity is rearticulated on the basis of alterity. Rather than seeking a 'Herculean Constitution', transconstitutionalism tackles the many-headed Hydra of constitutionalism, always looking for the blind spot in one legal system and reflecting it back against the many others found in the world's legal orders.
The top courts in Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea have reshaped constitutional law on non-discrimination, criminal due process, and free speech. This volume explores how their constitutional jurisprudence has converged in the process.
More than two decades after the post-communist constitutional transition, Hungary got into the spotlight again. As a result of the 2010 elections, the governing majority gained two-thirds of the seats in parliament, which made constitutional revision exceptionally easy, bypassing extensive political and social deliberations. In April 2011, on the first anniversary of the 2010 election, a brand new constitution was promulgated, named the Fundamental Law. This collection is the most comprehensive account of the Fundamental Law and its underlying principles. The objective is to analyze this constitutional transition from the perspectives of comparative constitutional law, legal theory and political philosophy. The authors outline and analyze how the current constitutional changes are altering the basic structure of the Hungarian State. The key concepts of the theoretical inquiry are sociological and normative legitimacy, majoritarian and partnership approach to democracy, procedural and substantive elements of constitutionalism. Changes are also examined in the field of human rights, focusing on the principles of equality, dignity, and civil liberties.