ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on the theory of law and its place in political democracy that Jurgen Habermas has developed, revised, and extended. It deals primarily with the themes of Between Facts and Norms. The book then considers respectively, Habermas’s theory of basic rights, his account of democratic deliberation, and his conception of constitutions and judicial review by constitutional courts. It also considers Habermas’s law-relevant writings of the years after Between Facts and Norms. The book addresses Habermas’s intervention into the Rawls-inspired debate over religion’s place in the public sphere. It then focuses on Habermas’s extension of his “discourse theory of law and democracy” to transnational and global contexts beyond the nation-state. The book also addresses his engagement with a long-running debate, reenergized in 1993 by John Rawls’s publication of Political Liberalism, over the proper place of religion in democratic political discussion.
