ABSTRACT
This volume seeks to arrive at a better understanding of how the relationship between public law and politics is conceptualised by constitutional theorists today. And to this end we asked the contributors in this volume to take issue with the following question: Should constitutionalism be envisaged as a discrete sphere, hermeneutically closed off or self-standing, subject to its own proper logic which can be described without the deployment of categories of political theory? The book brings together three leading constitutionalists: Frank Michelman from the American constitutionalist tradition which has its emphasis on internal constitutional debates surrounding the substance and processes of a long-settled and popularly endorsed written constitutional settlement. Martin Loughlin who, in The Idea of Public Law,1 articulates a relational account of public law as a phenomenon that has developed in close synergy with its political environment; an account steeped in classical European thinking from the age of modernity to the present. And James Tully, whose radical philosophy presents one of the most startling challenges to orthodox constitutional thinking today, asking questions of liberal constitutionalism in an age where people and peoples call for constitutional recognition of the pluralism which, for Tully, both defines our time and is obscured in the hegemonic structures of established constitutional theory and practice. This project was organised by the Centre for Law and Society within the University of Edinburgh through three day-long workshops in 2006, each involving one of the main contributors and a number of papers offered in commentary by members of the Edinburgh Law School and colleagues working in the area of constitutional and political theory either in Scotland or abroad. This collection comprises a selection of these commentaries.
