Jury Nullification and the Constituent Power of the People

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert P. Burns
Keyword(s):  
Constituent Power ◽  
Jury Nullification ◽  
The People

Constituent Power and Constitutive Exceptions: Carl Schmitt, Populism and the Consummation of Secularisation

2020 ◽  
pp. 199-214
Author(s):  
Jon Wittrock
Keyword(s):  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Logical Space ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
The People ◽  
Cultural Markers

This chapter considers the role of the people in Carl Schmitt’s theorizing on democracy, and invokes the concept of constitutive boundaries as a way of understanding how communities are reproduced by way of territorial borders as well as criteria for membership and cultural markers, e.g. symbols, rituals, and holidays. The chapter suggests that the latter constitute instances of a larger logical space of constitutive exceptions, that, Schmitt implies, reproduce existing orders, but also threaten to replace them with new ones; thus, such exceptions may be surrounded by protective boundaries of the sacred, concretely as well as abstractly. Ultimately, we may visualize an entire topology of the exceptional, which is subject to fierce contestation, since it points to the possibility of new orders beyond existing ones, which may be interpreted in terms of different trajectories of highly ambiguous processes of secularization.

The Power of the People

2020 ◽  
pp. 166-182
Author(s):  
Ari Hirvonen ◽  
Susanna Lindroos-Hovinheimo
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Contemporary Theory ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Theoretical Idea ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
Alain Badiou ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
The People ◽  
Jacques Rancière

In this chapter Hirvonen and Lindroos-Hovinheimo argue that the revolutionary power of constituent power and popular sovereignty are relevant conditions of radical emancipatory and egalitarian politics. How the people become the people – and what makes the people in its becoming – are relevant questions in modern democracy. The article considers the power of the people as a theoretical idea and political possibility. It brings together the older tradition of political philosophy with contemporary theory by discussing Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas together with those of Jacques Rancière, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Alain Badiou.

The Abuse of Constituent Power

2021 ◽  
pp. 116-151
Author(s):  
Rosalind Dixon ◽  
David Landau
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Latin America ◽  
International Law ◽  
Term Limits ◽  
Constitutional Amendment ◽  
Military Coup ◽  
Elected Officials ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
The People ◽  
Constitutional Identity

This chapter explores the abusive borrowing of ideas related to constituent power—the concept that all power ultimately stems from the people, and which thus reserves power to the people to replace their constitution, while limiting the ability of ‘constituted’ institutions to make fundamental changes. It shows how constituent power theory has been abused to legitimate anti-democratic Constituent Assemblies, including twice in recent years in Venezuela. It also demonstrates how the unconstitutional constitutional amendment doctrine has been wielded throughout Latin America to eradicate presidential term limits, on the argument that they are infringements of the human rights of both voters and elected officials. Finally, it explores the anti-democratic use of international law doctrines related to constituent power: the abuse of ‘unconstitutional government’ norms to justify a military coup in Fiji, and the wielding of the European Union’s constitutional identity doctrines for illiberal or anti-democratic ends in Hungary and Poland.

Regional-Cosmopolitan Constituent Power

2020 ◽  
pp. 69-86
Author(s):  
Markus Patberg
Keyword(s):  
Member State ◽  
First Principles ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
The People ◽  
We The People ◽  
The Eu

This chapter deals with the question of whether the public narrative of ‘We, the people of Europe’, which claims constituent power for a cross-border demos composed of EU citizens, can be justified in terms of a systematic model. To that end, it draws on the political theory of regional cosmopolitanism, which holds that even though the EU is not a state, it has its own political community. The literature on regional cosmopolitanism offers two possible strategies of defending the idea of an EU-wide constituent power: a first-principles approach and a reconstructive approach. The chapter argues that only the latter proves viable, and then goes on to examine the merits of the model that it gives rise to. While regional-cosmopolitan constituent power plausibly responds to the fact that the EU has created a new group of addressees and authors of the law, it neglects the continuing importance of the member state peoples and fails to explain how an EU-wide constituent power could be reconciled with the compound and dependent nature of the EU polity.

scholarly journals The Strange Fruit of the Tree of Liberty: Lynch Law and Popular Sovereignty in the United States

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 819-834
Author(s):  
Michael Gorup
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Due Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Modern Democracy ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
The People ◽  
The Right

Lynch mobs regularly called on the language of popular sovereignty in their efforts to authorize lynchings, arguing that, as representatives of the people, they retained the right to wield public violence against persons they deemed beyond the protections of due process. Despite political theorists’ renewed interest in popular sovereignty, scholars have not accounted for this sordid history in their genealogies of modern democracy and popular constituent power. I remedy this omission, arguing that spectacle lynchings—ones that occurred in front of large crowds, sometimes numbering in the thousands—operated as public rituals of racialized people-making. In the wake of Reconstruction, when the boundaries of the polity were deeply contested, spectacle lynchings played a constitutive role in affirming and circulating the notion that the sovereign people were white, and that African Americans were their social subordinates.

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