Constitutions are no longer exclusively national projects, but increasingly result from broader transnational processes that form a transnational legal order.

This book examines the largely neglected but crucial role of transnational actors in democratic constitution-making. The writing or rewriting of constitutions is usually a key moment in democratic transitions. But how exactly does this take place? Most contemporary comparative constitutional literature draws on the concept of constituent power – the power of the people – to address this moment. But what this overlooks, this book argues, is the important role of external, transnational actors who tend to play a crucial role in the process. Drawing on sociolegal methodologies but informed by new legal realism, this book develops a new theoretical framework for examining the involvement of such actors in constitution-making. Empirically grounded, the book uncovers a more comprehensive picture of how constitution-making unfolds on the ground. Illuminating the power dynamics at play during the legal process, it reveals not only the wide range of external actors involved but also the continuity between decolonisation and post-Cold War constitution-making. This book, the first to provide an in-depth examination of external actor involvement in constitution-making, will appeal to scholars of constitutional law, sociolegal studies, law and development, and transitional justice.

This book develops a unique sociological approach to the analysis of transnational legal norms. This title is also available as Open Access.

Constitutional law in the United States and around the world now operates within an increasingly transnational legal environment of international treaties, customary international law, supranational infrastructures of human rights and trade law, and growing comparative judicial awareness. This new environment is reflected in increasing cross-national references in constitutional court decisions around the world. The constellation of legal orders in which established constitutional regimes operate has changed - there are more bodies generating law, more international legal sources, and more multi-national interactions that bring into view various legal orders. How do these transnational phenomena affect our understanding of the role of constitutions and of courts in deciding constitutional cases? Constitutional Engagement in a Transnational Era explores this question, looking at constitutional court decisions from around the world, and identifying postures of resistance, convergence or engagement with international and foreign law. For the United States, the book argues for cautious engagement by the Supreme Court with transnational sources of law in interpreting the national constitution. Constitutional Engagement in a Transnational Era offers law school students and professors an authoritative study of comparative constitutional law by one of the most important scholars of domestic and comparative constitutional law. The book defines how international comparative experiences are relevant to constitutional analysis and discusses in detail the multiple possible connections between international law and constitutional law including a comparative overview of constitutional law in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, India, Israel, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The last fifty years has seen a worldwide trend toward constitutional democracy. But can constitutionalism become truly global? Relying on historical examples of successfully implanted constitutional regimes, ranging from the older experiences in the United States and France to the relatively recent ones in Germany, Spain and South Africa, Michel Rosenfeld sheds light on the range of conditions necessary for the emergence, continuity and adaptability of a viable constitutional identity - citizenship, nationalism, multiculturalism, and human rights being important elements. The Identity of the Constitutional Subject is the first systematic analysis of the concept, drawing on philosophy, psychoanalysis, political theory and law from a comparative perspective to explore the relationship between the ideal of constitutionalism and the need to construct a common constitutional identity that is distinct from national, cultural, ethnic or religious identity. The Identity of the Constitutional Subject will be of interest to students and scholars in law, legal and political philosophy, political science, multicultural studies, international relations and US politics.

The long-continuing constitutional debate within Canada has brought a search today for new constitutional-govermental models of paradigms capable of taking us all safely into the 21st century. For students of contemporary constitutionalism, no country's experience has been more seriously studied than that of the West German federal state formed out of the three Western zones of Germany in 1949 and endowed with what was then described as a temporary governmental charter, pending final reunification of Germany.

This book brings together two themes of enormous current intellectual and emotional impact: democracy and its institutional forms and the globalization of economic, social and cultural affairs. The volume pursues the meaning of transnational democracy through an examination of the sources of novel democratic potential at multiple levels, from the local to the global. To a very great extent, this task depends upon a critical analysis of state and nation formation, state-level democratization and transnational social movement emergence.In engaging these complex issues, the authors find themselves drawn into intellectual and geographic territories as diverse as European institutional and intellectual history, North American and European trade agreements, Canadian constitutionalism, African state-society relations and debates regarding the democratic peace. While the coverage is global in its attention to transnational institutions and international non-governmental organizations for instance, it is also genuinely regional, as it seeks out - and critically assesses - the potential building blocks for a more appropriately democratic future in the varied forms that the institutionalization of globalization assumes around the world.