Many recent arguments for trans-state and global democracy would offer broad leeway on constitutionalized right standards to states, and few formal mechanisms for individuals to challenge domestic rights rejections beyond the state. Such a stance, it is shown here, tends to be rooted in implicit presumptions of domestic consensus. Challenges are offered to this and related presumptions in accounts of cosmopolitan democracy, as well as global variants of liberal nationalism and political liberalism. An alternative, primarily instrumental approach to trans-state and global democracy is detailed. It would give emphasis to ways in which formal suprastate participation, complemented by challenge mechanisms for individuals, could play a crucial role in helping to strengthen individual rights protections within states. The case for adopting such an approach is reinforced through attention to the efforts of a persistent domestic democratic minority – Dalits in India – to reach out to the global human rights regime for help in pressuring their own state to better protect rights against exclusion and subjugation.

Many critics of the proportionality principle argue that balancing is an instrument of judicial self-empowerment. This contribution argues that the relationship between balancing and judicial power is more complex. Balancing does not necessarily create judicial power, but it presupposes it. This argument is confirmed through a case study of the German Federal Constitutional Court. The analysis shows that the German Constitutional Court was very reluctant to base decisions, in which it overturned legislation, on balancing in the first two and a half decades of its jurisprudence. However, in the late 1970s, once the Court had strengthened its own institutional position, it increasingly relied on balancing when declaring laws as incompatible with the constitution. Then, balancing developed into the predominant argumentation framework of constitutional review that it is today in the Court’s jurisprudence.

The author’s 2012 book On Global Justice gives pride of place to the idea that humanity collectively owns the earth. Independently, there has been a flourishing literature on the justification of rights to territory. Central to this discussion are a Kantian and a Lockean approach. This paper recapitulates the author’s approach to humanity’s collective ownership of the earth and argues that, properly understood, both of those approaches should integrate the global standpoint constituted thereby. However, the goal here is not to amend the Kantian and Lockean approaches to territory, but to refute them. To that end the paper also argues that both approaches endorse an unacceptably strong view of the justifiability of states and should therefore be rejected. The view in On Global Justice emerges vindicated, according to which territorial rights, the justification of states and immigration all need to be theorized together, and need to be theorized from a genuinely global standpoint.

National courts, largely in South Asia and Latin America, have deemed unconstitutional certain constitutional amendments that have been enacted into law in their respective jurisdictions. In the article, this author explores the normative arguments for and against the judicial enforcement of implicit substantive constraints on formal constitutional changes. In essence, the author argues that, in determining whether judges should render the substance of constitutional amendments unconstitutional, one must examine how the impugned constitutional amendment was passed. In jurisdictions where a constitutional amendment can be passed by a dominant party/coalition without bipartisan support or the general support of the people, the courts may intervene, but only where the constitutional amendment(s) in question is/are so manifestly unreasonable that such a revision is akin to a substantial destruction of the pre-existing constitution. But no constitutional amendment should ever be judicially invalidated for violating any implied ‘basic features’ of the constitution when the amendment process is particularly cumbersome and requires significant bipartisan support and the general public’s express or implicit endorsement for the amendment to pass.