One of the most topical questions in the legal systems is whether and to what extent fundamental rights impact our rights and obligations in our contractual relations. The European Union has integrated the Charter of Fundamental Rights into the Treaties of Rome and Lisbon. This book highlights whether and to what extent fundamental rights affect the position of citizens generally and in various fields of law, such as private (contractual) law, labour law,financial services, intellectual property rights, and the judicial protection in courts.

This publication aims at establishing a clear analysis of the nature and growth of the C-factor (C for constitutionalisation) in Germany, France, the UK and The Netherlands.

In countries and supranational entities around the globe, constitutional reform has transferred an unprecedented amount of power from representative institutions to judiciaries. The constitutionalization of rights and the establishment of judicial review are widely believed to have benevolent and progressive origins, and significant redistributive, power-diffusing consequences. Ran Hirschl challenges this conventional wisdom. Drawing upon a comprehensive comparative inquiry into the political origins and legal consequences of the recent constitutional revolutions in Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and South Africa, Hirschl shows that the trend toward constitutionalization is hardly driven by politicians' genuine commitment to democracy, social justice, or universal rights. Rather, it is best understood as the product of a strategic interplay among hegemonic yet threatened political elites, influential economic stakeholders, and judicial leaders. This self-interested coalition of legal innovators determines the timing, extent, and nature of constitutional reforms. Hirschl demonstrates that whereas judicial empowerment through constitutionalization has a limited impact on advancing progressive notions of distributive justice, it has a transformative effect on political discourse. The global trend toward juristocracy, Hirschl argues, is part of a broader process whereby political and economic elites, while they profess support for democracy and sustained development, attempt to insulate policymaking from the vicissitudes of democratic politics.

The Constitution incorporates human rights as a dominant feature of its order pervading every aspect of the law and has been the sole source of authority, with the Judiciary cast as a watchdog trusted to ensure that no branch of the State transgresses the boundaries of its powers. The book chronicles through the case law of the Supreme Court, a precedent of constitutionalism worthy of the attention of every scholar of constitutional law.

The book examines one of the most debated issues in current international law: to what extent the international legal system has constitutional features comparable to what we find in national law. This question has become increasingly relevant in a time of globalization, where new international institutions and courts are established to address international issues. Constitutionalization beyond the nation state has for many years been discussed in relation to the European Union. This book asks whether we now see constitutionalization taking place also at the global level. The book investigates what should be characterized as constitutional features of the current international order, in what way the challenges differ from those at the national level and what could be a proper interaction between different international arrangements as well as between the international and national constitutional level. Finally, it sketches the outlines of what a constitutionalized world order could and should imply. The book is a critical appraisal of constitutionalist ideas and of their critique. It argues that the reconstruction of the current evolution of international law as a process of constitutionalization -against a background of, and partly in competition with, the verticalization of substantive law and the deformalization and fragmentation of international law- has some explanatory power, permits new insights and allows for new arguments. The book thus identifies constitutional trends and challenges in establishing international organisational structures, and designs procedures for standard-setting, implementation and judicial functions. This paperback edition features the authors' discussion of this book on the EJIL Talks blog.

This book provides a comparative perspective on one of the most intriguing developments in law: the influence of basic rights and human rights in private law. It analyzes the application of basic rights and human rights, which are traditionally understood as public law rights, in private law, and discusses the related spillover effects and changing perspectives in legal doctrine and practice. It provides examples where basic rights and human rights influence judicial reasoning and lead to changes of legislation in contract law, tort law, property law, family law, and copyright law. Providing both context and background analysis for any critical examination of the horizontal effect of fundamental rights in private law, the book contributes to the current debate on an important issue that deserves the attention of legal practitioners, scholars, judges and others involved in the developments in a variety of the world’s jurisdictions. This book is based on the General Report and national reports commissioned by the International Academy of Comparative Law and written for the XIXth International Congress of Comparative Law in Vienna, Austria, in the summer of 2014.

This collection offers a powerful and coherent study of the transformation of the multinational enterprise as both an object and subject of law within and beyond States. The study develops an analysis of the large firm as being a system of organization exercising vast powers through various instruments of private law, such as property rights, contracts and corporations. The volume focuses on the firm as the operational unit of governance within emerging systems of globalization, whilst exploring in-depth the forms within which the firm might be regulated as against the inhibiting parameters of national law. It connects, through the ordering concept of the firm in globalization, the distinct regimes of constitutionalization, national and international law. The study will be of interest to students and academics in globalization and the regulation of multinational corporations, as well as law, economics and politics on a global scale. It will also interest government leaders and NGOs working in the areas of MNE regulations.

New Private Law Theory is pluralist, comparative, application-oriented, transnational and reflects critical approaches.

This two-volume book, published open access, brings together leading scholars of constitutional law from twenty-nine European countries to revisit the role of national constitutions at a time when decision-making has increasingly shifted to the European and transnational level. It offers important insights into three areas. First, it explores how constitutions reflect the transfer of powers from domestic to European and global institutions. Secondly, it revisits substantive constitutional values, such as the protection of constitutional rights, the rule of law, democratic participation and constitutional review, along with constitutional court judgments that tackle the protection of these rights and values in the transnational context, e.g. with regard to the Data Retention Directive, the European Arrest Warrant, the ESM Treaty, and EU and IMF austerity measures. The responsiveness of the ECJ regarding the above rights and values, along with the standard of protection, is also assessed. Thirdly, challenges in the context of global governance in relation to judicial review, democratic control and accountability are examined. On a broader level, the contributors were also invited to reflect on what has increasingly been described as the erosion or ‘twilight’ of constitutionalism, or a shift to a thin version of the rule of law, democracy and judicial review in the context of Europeanisation and globalisation processes. The national reports are complemented by a separately published comparative study, which identifies a number of broader trends and challenges that are shared across several Member States and warrant wider discussion. The research for this publication and the comparative study were carried out within the framework of the ERC-funded project ‘The Role and Future of National Constitutions in European and Global Governance’. The book is aimed at scholars, researchers, judges and legal advisors working on the interface between national constitutional law and EU and transnational law. The extradition cases are also of interest to scholars and practitioners in the field of criminal law. Anneli Albi is Professor of European Law at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. Samo Bardutzky is Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Analyses the mediation of property rights and social justice through the prism of 'progressive' constitutional property rights guarantees.