The modern state, law, and constitution result from a legal canon that (re)produces the abyssal lines dividing the world that is validated from the world whose humanity and epistemological validity are denied. This book aims to contribute to a post-abyssal reflection on law and constitutionalism by considering the structural axes of power that are constitutive of modern law “capitalism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy” alongside the legal plurality of the world. Is it possible to decolonize, decommodify, and depatriarchalize the constitution? The authors speak from multiple geographies, raise different questions, resort to differentiated theoretical approaches, and reveal varying levels of optimism about the possibilities of transforming constitutions. The readers are confronted with critical perspectives on the Eurocentric legal canon, as well as with the recognition of anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-patriarchal legal experiences. The horizon of this publication is the expansion of the possibilities of legal and political imagination.

The modern state, law, and constitution result from a legal canon that (re)produces the abyssal lines dividing the world that is validated from the world whose humanity and epistemological validity are denied. This book aims to contribute to a post-abyssal reflection on law and constitutionalism by considering the structural axes of power that are constitutive of modern law “capitalism, colonialism, and heteropatriarchy” alongside the legal plurality of the world. Is it possible to decolonize, decommodify, and depatriarchalize the constitution? The authors speak from multiple geographies, raise different questions, resort to differentiated theoretical approaches, and reveal varying levels of optimism about the possibilities of transforming constitutions. The readers are confronted with critical perspectives on the Eurocentric legal canon, as well as with the recognition of anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, and anti-patriarchal legal experiences. The horizon of this publication is the expansion of the possibilities of legal and political imagination.

"It presents an alternative perspective on the end of Empire by focusing upon one aspect of constitutional decolonization and the importance of the local legal culture in determining each dependency's constitutional settlement, and provides a series of empirical case studies on the incorporation of human rights instruments into domestic constitutions when negotiated between a state and its dependencies. More generally this book highlights Britain's human rights legacy to its former Empire."--BOOK JACKET.

This book brings together Indigenous, Third World and Settler perspectives on the theory and practice of decolonizing law. Colonialism, imperialism, and settler colonialism continue to affect the lives of racialized communities and Indigenous Peoples around the world. Law, in its many iterations, has played an active role in the dispossession and disenfranchisement of colonized peoples. Law and its various institutions are the means by which colonial, imperial, and settler colonial programs and policies continue to be reinforced and sustained. There are, however, recent and historical examples in which law has played a significant role in dismantling colonial and imperial structures set up during the process of colonization. This book combines usually distinct Indigenous, Third World and Settler perspectives in order to take up the effort of decolonizing law: both in practice and in the concern to distance and to liberate the foundational theories of legal knowledge and academic engagement from the manifestations of colonialism, imperialism and settler colonialism. Including work by scholars from the Global South and North, this book will be of interest to academics, students and others interested in the legacy of colonial and settler law, and its overcoming.

Britain’s main imperial possessions in Asia were granted independence in the 1940s and 1950s and needed to craft constitutions for their new states. Invariably the indigenous elites drew upon British constitutional ideas and institutions regardless of the political conditions that prevailed in their very different lands. Many Asian nations called upon the services of Englishman and Law Professor Sir Ivor Jennings to advise or assist their own constitution making. Although he was one of the twentieth century’s most prominent constitutional scholars, his opinion and influence were often controversial and remain so due to his advocating British norms in Asian form. This book examines the process of constitutional formation in the era of decolonisation and state building in Asia. It sheds light upon the influence and participation of Jennings in particular and British ideas in general on democracy and institutions across the Asian continent. Critical cases studies on India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Nepal – all linked by Britain and Jennings – assess the distinctive methods and outcomes of constitution making and how British ideas fared in these major states. The book offers chapters on the Westminster model in Asia, Human Rights, Nationalism, Ethnic politics, Federalism, Foreign influence, Decolonisation, Authoritarianism, the Rule of Law, Parliamentary democracy and the power and influence of key political actors. Taking an original stance on constitution making in Asia after British rule, it also puts forward ideas of contemporary significance for Asian states and other emerging democracies engaged in constitution making, regime change and seeking to understand their colonial past. The first political, historical or constitutional analysis comparing Asia’s experience with its indelible British constitutional legacy, this book is a critical resource on state building and constitution making in Asia following independence. It will appeal to students and scholars of world history, public law and politics.

A major American legal thinker, the late Ronald Dworkin also helped shape new dispensations in the Global South. In South Africa, in particular, his work has been fiercely debated in the context of one of the world’s most progressive constitutions. Despite Dworkin’s discomfort with that document’s enshrinement of “socioeconomic rights,” his work enables an important defense of a jurisprudence premised on justice, rather than on legitimacy. Beginning with a critical overview of Dworkin’s work culminating in his two principles of dignity, Cornell and Friedman turn to Kant and Hegel for an approach better able to ground the principles of dignity Dworkin advocates. Framed thus, Dworkin’s challenge to legal positivism enables a theory of constitutional revolution in which existing legal structures are transformatively revalued according to ethical mandates. By founding law on dignity, Dworkin begins to articulate an ethical jurisprudence responsive to the lived experience of injustice. This book, then, articulates a revolutionary constitutionalism crucial to the struggle for decolonization.

This book examines the largely neglected but crucial role of transnational actors in democratic constitution-making. The writing or rewriting of constitutions is usually a key moment in democratic transitions. But how exactly does this take place? Most contemporary comparative constitutional literature draws on the concept of constituent power – the power of the people – to address this moment. But what this overlooks, this book argues, is the important role of external, transnational actors who tend to play a crucial role in the process. Drawing on sociolegal methodologies but informed by new legal realism, this book develops a new theoretical framework for examining the involvement of such actors in constitution-making. Empirically grounded, the book uncovers a more comprehensive picture of how constitution-making unfolds on the ground. Illuminating the power dynamics at play during the legal process, it reveals not only the wide range of external actors involved but also the continuity between decolonisation and post-Cold War constitution-making. This book, the first to provide an in-depth examination of external actor involvement in constitution-making, will appeal to scholars of constitutional law, sociolegal studies, law and development, and transitional justice.

This volume makes a timely intervention into a field which is marked by a shift from unipolar to multipolar order and a pluralization of constitutional law. It addresses the theoretical and epistemic foundations of Southern constitutionalism and discusses its distinctive themes, such as transformative constitutionalism, inequality, access to justice, and authoritarian legality. This title has three goals. First, to pluralize the conversation around constitutional law. While most scholarship focuses on liberal forms of Western constitutions, this book attempts to take comparative law's promise to cover all major legal systems of the world seriously; second, to reflect critically on the epistemic framework and the distribution of epistemic powers in the scholarly community of comparative constitutional law; third, to reflect on - and where necessary, test - the notion of the Global South in comparative constitutional law. This book breaks down the theories, themes, and global picture of comparative constitutionalism in the Global South. What emerges is a rich tapestry of constitutional experiences that pluralizes comparative constitutional law as both a discipline and a field of knowledge.

Colonial Constitutionalism exposes one of the great failures of American democracy. It posits that the creation of a U.S. 'empire' over the last century violated the basis of American constitutionalism through its failure to fully admit annexed offshore territories into the Union. The book's focused case studies analyze each of America's quasi-colonies, revealing how the perpetuation of a this 'imperialist' strategy has rendered the inhabitants second class citizens. E. Robert Statham, Jr.'s work emphasizes the pressing need--in the face of increasingly strident calls for sovereign independence from America's offshore territories--for a modern American republic, fundamentally incompatible with imperialism and colonialism, to grant full U.S. statehood to its overseas possessions.

This book advances practical protection of human rights, and challenge claims of western monopoly of human rights discourse.