Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-fscjk Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-24T16:59:13.917Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

A Kantian system of constitutional justice: Rights, trusteeship, balancing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2017

ALEC STONE SWEET*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore, Eu Tong Sen Building 469G Bukit Timah Road, Singapore, 259776
ERIC PALMER*
Affiliation:
Law School, Yale University, 127 Wall St, New Haven, CT 06511, USA

Abstract:

The article develops a Kantian account of constitutional justice: the explication of those structural features of a legal system whose purpose is to optimise a polity’s capacity to achieve a Rightful condition. The People, in enacting a rights-based constitution, have placed their freedom in trust. Rights ground a system of reciprocal freedom among individuals, while conferring on officials the authority to make and enforce law, subject to constraints laid down by the Universal Principle of Right [UPR]. A constitutional court, the trustee of the regime, supervises the rights-regarding acts of all other officials, assesses the reasons officials give when they take decisions that burden rights, and invalidates those acts when reasons given to justify such burdens fail to meet the demands of the UPR. Although some rights will be expressed in absolute terms, most will be qualified by a limitation clause. In adjudicating qualified rights, the court can do no better than to adopt the proportionality principle. The UPR, operationalised through proportionality analysis, lays down a basic criterion for the legitimacy of all law. Because Public, International, and Cosmopolitan Right share certain micro-foundations in common, we can extend the analysis to transnational systems of rights protection.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Aleinikoff, T. Alexander. 1987. ‘‘Constitutional Law in the Age of Balancing.’’ Yale Law Journal 96:9431005.Google Scholar
Alexy, Robert. 2002. A Theory of Constitutional Rights. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Barak, Aharon. 2012a. Proportionality: Constitutional Rights and Their Limitations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199578610.013.0036Google Scholar
Barak, Aharon. 2012b. ‘‘Proportionality.’’ In Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law, edited by Rosenberg, Michel and Sajó, András, 738–55. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Barak, Aharon. 2010. ‘‘Proportionality and Principled Balancing.’’ Law & Ethics of Human Rights 4(1):116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brown, Garrett Wallace. 2009. Grounding Cosmopolitanism: From Kant to the Idea of a Cosmopolitan Constitution. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Cushman, Fiery, Young, Liane and Hauser, Marc. 2006. ‘‘The Role of Reasoning and Intuition in Moral Judgments: Testing Three Principles of Harm.’’ Psychological Science 17:1082–89.10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01834.xCrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Davis, Kevin. 1991. ‘‘Kantian Publicity and Political Justice.’’ History of Philosophy Quarterly 8(4):409–21.Google Scholar
Flikschuh, Katrin. 2000. Kant and Modern Political Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Forst, Ranier. 2011. The Right to Justification: Elements of a Constructivist Theory of Justice. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Friedman, Barry. 1998. ‘‘The History of the Countermajoritarian Difficulty, Part One: The Road to Judicial Supremacy.’’ New York University Law Review 73(2):333433.Google Scholar
Gardbaum, Stephen. 2012. The New Commonwealth Model of Constitutionalism: Theory and Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gardbaum, Stephen. 2010. ‘‘Reassessing the New Commonwealth Model of Constitutionalism.’’ International Journal of Constitutional Law 8(2):167206.Google Scholar
Grimm, Dieter. 2007. ‘‘Proportionality in Canadian and German Constitutional Jurisprudence.’’ University of Toronto Law School 57(2):383–97.Google Scholar
Han, David. 2014. ‘‘The Mechanics of First Amendment Audience Analysis.’’ William and Mary Law Review 55(1):16471717.Google Scholar
Hart, Herbert. 1994. The Concept of Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Hiebert, Janet. 2011. ‘‘Governing Like Judges?’’ In The Legal Protection of Human Rights, edited by Campbell, Tom, Ewing, Keith and Tomkins, Adam, 4063. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hiebert, Janet. 2012. ‘‘Governing under the Human Rights Act: The Limitations of Wishful Thinking’’ Public Law 1:27–44.Google Scholar
Hodgson, Louis-Philippe. 2010. ‘‘Kant on the Right to Freedom: A Defense.’’ Ethics 120 (July):791819.Google Scholar
Jarvis Thomson, Judith. 1985. ‘‘The Trolley Problem.’’ Yale Law Journal 94:13951415.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. 1996. [1797]. In The Metaphysics of Morals, edited by Gregor, Mary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/CBO9780511809644CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. 2006. [1795]. ‘‘Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.’’ In Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, edited by Kleingeld, Pauline. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. 1994 [1784]. ‘‘An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?’’ In Kant: Political Writings, edited by Reiss, Hans, 5460. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. 1900. Critique of Pure Reason. New York, NY: Colonial Press, 1900.Google Scholar
Kumm, Mattias. 2016. ‘‘Constituent Power, Cosmopolitan Constitutionalism, and Post-Positivist Law.’’ International Journal of Constitutional Law 14:697711.10.1093/icon/mow050Google Scholar
Kumm, Mattias. 2010. ‘‘The Idea of Socratic Contestation and the Right to Justification: The Point of Rights-Based Proportionality Review.’’ Law & Ethics of Human Rights 4(1):141–75.Google Scholar
Kumm, Mattias. 2004. ‘‘Constitutional Rights as Principles: On the Structure and Domain of Constitutional Justice.’’ International Journal of Constitutional Law 2: 574–96.Google Scholar
Laursen, John Christian. 1986. ‘‘The Subversive Kant: The Vocabulary of ‘Public’ and ‘Publicity’.’’ Political Theory 14(4):584603.10.1177/0090591786014004003Google Scholar
Leib, Ethan, Ponet, David and Serota, Michael. 2013. ‘‘A Fiduciary Theory of Judging.’’ California Law Review 101(3):699753.Google Scholar
Mathews, Jud and Sweet, Alec Stone. 2011. ‘‘All Things in Proportion? American Rights Review and the Problem of Balancing.’’ Emory Law Journal 60:102–79.Google Scholar
Ripstein, Arthur. 2009. Force and Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.10.4159/9780674054516Google Scholar
Stone, Martin. 2011. ‘‘Legal Positivism As an Idea about Morality.’’ University of Toronto Law Journal 61(Spring):313–41.Google Scholar
Stone Sweet, Alec. 2017. ‘‘Constitutions, Rights, and Judicial Power.’’ In Comparative Politics (4th edn), edited by Caramani, Daniele. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Stone Sweet, Alec. 2012a. ‘‘A Cosmopolitan Legal Order: Constitutional Pluralism and Rights Adjudication in Europe.’’ Journal of Global Constitutionalism 1(1):5390.10.1017/S2045381711000062Google Scholar
Stone Sweet, Alec. 2012b. ‘‘Constitutional Courts.’’ In Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law, edited by Rosenberg, Michel and Sajó, András, 816–30. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Stone Sweet, Alec. 2002. ‘‘Constitutional Courts and Parliamentary Democracy.’’ West European Politics 25:77100.Google Scholar
Stone Sweet, Alec. 2000. Governing with Judges: Constitutional Politics in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Stone Sweet, Alec and Brunell, Thomas. 2013. ‘‘Trustee Courts and the Judicialization of International Regimes: The Politics of Majoritarian Activism in the ECHR, the EU, and the WTO.’’ Journal of Law and Courts 1:6188.Google Scholar
Stone Sweet, Alec and Mathews, Jud. 2008. ‘‘Proportionality and Global Constitutionalism.’’ Columbia Journal of Transnational Law 47:73165.Google Scholar
Thatcher, Mark and Sweet, Alec Stone. 2002. ‘‘Theory and Practice of Delegation to Non-Majoritarian Institutions.’’ West European Politics 25:122.10.1080/713601583Google Scholar
Waldron, Jeremy. 2006. ‘‘The Core of the Case against Judicial Review.’’ Yale Law Journal 115:13461406.Google Scholar
Waldron, Jeremy. 2004. ‘‘Some Models of Dialogues between Judges and Legislators.’’ Supreme Court Review 23:747.Google Scholar
Weinrib, Jacob. 2014. ‘‘The Modern Constitutional State: A Defence.’’ Queen’s Law Journal 40:165211.Google Scholar
Williams, Howard. (2015). ‘‘Kantian Underpinnings for a Theory of Multirights.’’ In Kantian Theory and Human Rights, edited by Follesdal, Andreas and Maliks, Reidar, 826. New York, NY and Oxford: Routledge.Google Scholar
Zylberman, Ariel. 2016. ‘‘The Public Form of Law: Kant on the Second-Personal Constitution of Freedom.’’ Kantian Review 21(1):101–26.10.1017/S1369415415000321Google Scholar
Zylberman, Ariel. 2015. ‘‘Kant’s Juridical Idea of Human Rights.’’ In Kantian Theory and Human Rights, edited by Follesdal, Andreas and Maliks, Reidar, 2751. New York, NY and Oxford: Routledge.Google Scholar