Justification by constitution and tiered constitutional design

Bibliographic Data

ID11340637
AuthorsRosalind Dixon (0000-0002-6613-8032, UNSW Sydney, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume50
Issue7
Pages1051-1063
Publication date2024-09-01
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePhilosophy & Social Criticism (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0191-4537 • E-ISSN: 1461-734X
PublisherSAGE Publications (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/01914537241263273
OpenAlexW4401593429
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited35

Constitutions serve to legitimate the exercise of public power. Yet their scope is often subject to reasonable disagreement among citizens in a democracy. As Frank Michelman notes, this points to an understanding of democratic constitutions as a framework for contestation, rather than entrenched set of binding legal constraints. This understanding, however, arguably overlooks the difference between ordinary constitutional norms and those that protect the ‘democratic minimum core’. For the latter, there is far less scope for reasonable disagreement, and greater prudential importance to conceptualizing constitutions as entrenched norms authorized strong-form judicial review. The essay thus explores the idea of a ‘tiered’ approach to constitutional design, which combines elements of strong and weak constitutional entrenchment, and judicial review. In doing so, it further considers the role that transnational norms or practices could play in helping delineate these different constitutional tiers

Constitution · Constitutional economics · Constitutional law · Democracy · Judicial review · Law and economics · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Scope (computer science · Sociology · Subject (documents · Comparative constitutional jurisprudence studies · Computer Science · Judicial and Constitutional Studies · Law · Legal and Constitutional Studies

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