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Article contents
Blindness and Hindsight
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 March 2019
Extract
My book claims that constitutionalism is about constraining the exercise of public power in a legal manner. What it studies are different renderings of this idea and how one can arrive move from one to the next. What is essential to the success of the enterprise is, first, elaborating the relevant ideal types; second, analyzing how the transitions are made from one to the other; and third, taking public law as a way of conceiving of human practice, namely as activity that is essentially amenable to normative guidance and constraint. The people working and thinking in the world of public law use language that betrays ontological commitments to conspicuous entities such as “powers,” “values,” or “conventions.”
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