Prologue: Global and Pluralist Constitutionalism - Some Doubts

Prologue: Global and Pluralist Constitutionalism - Some Doubts

Description

Like an infectious virus which simply develops new resistant strains when we think we finally have it under control, so it is with . The most recent academic pandemic, particularly virulent (cerebral indigestion being one of its milder symptoms) is the result of a genetic fusion of the ubiquitous Global Constitutionalism and Constitutional Pluralism strains which dominated the 1990s and 2010s. Global Constitutionalism is already, at least in the eyes of some, a discrete academic discipline, with a soon to be published Journal of Global Constitutionalism, with various masters’ degrees, treatises and the other usual accoutrements. Constitutional Pluralism is today the only party membership card which will guarantee a seat at the high tables of the public law professoriate. From my vantage point of editor-in-chief of the deliciously and ambiguously entitled International Journal of Constitutional Law (I∙CON) I have begun to wonder: Is there anyone out there who is not a constitutional pluralist? Who does not believe that the global space is in some form constitutionalized? I do not recall ever using constitutional pluralism in my own writing, but like M. Jourdain, I was instructed that I too, apparently, converse in the prose of constitutional pluralism, which, paradoxically makes me (and everyone else) a comfortable Bourgeois gentilhomme. That, of course, is the price of success of a concept/fad: what begins as heterodoxy becomes prevailing orthodoxy, in this case when Constitutional Pluralism (the maverick constitutional pluralism strain) suddenly emerges as hopelessly politically correct.

Source Publication

The Worlds of European Constitutionalism

Source Editors/Authors

Gráinne de Búrca, J.H.H. Weiler

Publication Date

2012

Prologue: Global and Pluralist Constitutionalism - Some Doubts

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