All courts perform functions of a broadly constitutional kind. They provide a key mechanism for ensuring compliance with law and the peaceful resolution of disputes between people, according to law. Viewed from this perspective, they are integral to the capacity of a state to carry out its responsibility to establish and maintain internal peace and security.1 In one form or another, courts also are likely to be the forum for the resolution of that most challenging category of legal disputes: enforcing compliance with law by the institutions of the state itself. In each of these respects, courts are central to the rule of law. They may be analysed in terms of separation of powers or representative democracy, as well, where these are features of the constitution of the state.

Any analysis of the role of human rights in domestic constitutional law must grapple with a central tension lying at the core of the relationship between the two. Whereas constitutional law is inevitably grounded in a particular place covering defined sets of people, human rights aspire, as the term makes clear, to transcend the political in the name of entitlements that inhere in people wherever they are from and regardless of the governmental arrangements under which they live. National constitutional law can almost always point to a specific moment when the foundational document from which all else follows is agreed and brought into effect, and even in those very few places where this is not the case (the United Kingdom, for example) the ‘constitution’ is made up of a bundle of documents (statutes; judicial decisions; shared practices) which are similarly rooted in time as well as in place and people. In this way too human rights appear different: the vast ambition of the phrase involves a claim to stand outside a history made up not only of people and places but of foundational turning points as well.

This chapter examines the rise of the Independent Fiscal Institution (IFI) within the institutional structures of modern states. A new feature of the regulatory landscape in most of the jurisdictions where they are to be found, these institutions are designed to encourage fiscal responsibility on the government’s exercise of its budgetary responsibilities. The IFI often forms part of post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC) regulatory architecture1 and is familiar to students of political economy and financial regulation. But even though their activities relate directly to government in a way that is less true of other post-GFC innovations, IFIs have been largely ignored in the specialist public law literature, a by-product of the tendency among public lawyers to overlook the political economy dimensions of their field.2

International law has always been conceived as a project involving sovereign and equal states, who would be forever locked in battle with each other – if not literally, then at least metaphorically. The international legal order, such as it is, was always conceptualized as a horizontal order, mostly geared towards facilitating the co-existence of states, and with scant attention for planetary unity, or even for the interests of individual human beings. International law was made by states, to regulate relations between states, and for the benefit of states. What happened within those states was long considered anathema, and nothing was supposed to exist above those states.

Although the US Constitution is quite short, it is also quite old. The structures it called forth – including the presidency, the bicameral Congress, the Supreme Court – survive, even as their relationships have evolved. Its brief provisions have also spawned a complex body of jurisprudence on many issues that has shifted over more than two centuries; there are now more than 560 volumes of the official ‘US Reports’, that is, of cases decided by the US Supreme Court.1

The Constitution of India, adopted in 1949 and still in force today, was one of the earliest post-colonial Constitutions. Where the constitutional systems of most other newly independent states of the 1960s and 1970s have been marked by revolution, constitutional repeal and suspension, the Indian Constitution is remarkable for its durability. In fact, there are only a handful of states, with or without a colonial history, whose Constitutions have proved more resilient. The Indian Constitution is also the longest Constitution in the world, with the original draft consisting of 395 articles, eight schedules and a huge amount of administrative detail. There have also been 101 Amendments to the Constitution.

Until recently, standard accounts of the global constitutional landscape assigned the world’s constitutions to one of two dichotomous models for the constitutional protection of human rights: legislative supremacy or judicial supremacy. According to this binary taxonomy, the first model is characterized by the absence of any codified bill of rights and by the allocation of final authority on human rights questions to the legislative branch of the state. The second is characterized, to the contrary, by the presence of an entrenched and supreme law bill of rights, interpreted and enforced (including as against the legislature) by courts of some kind.1

Constitutionalism is the set of ideas that defines what a constitution is or ought to be. For some, there exists an essential core meaning of the term;1 while for others, the concepts of ‘constitution’ and ‘constitutionalism’ have fundamentally changed over time.2

The term ‘federalism’ refers both to a plurality of historical experiences, and features both a static-structural and a dynamic-procedural dimension. The first dimension refers to the concrete organizational forms assumed by federalism (such as in the United States or India); the second dimension, on the other hand, concerns federal processes, that is to say the historical evolution and the progressive development of a union between several communities (for example, the European Union or the United Provinces of the Netherlands in the modern era).