Oxford Constitutional Theory Legitimation by Constitution: A Dialogue on Political Liberalism (Hardcover)

Legitimation by Constitution is the phrase coined by distinguished authors Frank Michelman and Alessandro Ferrara for a key idea in Rawlsian political liberalism of a reliance on a dualist form of democracy-a subjection of ground-level lawmaking to the constraints of a higher-law constitution that most citizens could find acceptable as a framework for their politics-as a response to the problem of maintaining a liberally just stable and oppression-free democratic government in conditions of pluralist visionary conflict. Legitimation by Constitution recalls collects and combines a series of exchanges over the years between Michelman and Ferrara inspired by Rawls encapsulation of this conception in his proposed liberal principle of legitimacy. From a shared standpoint of sympathetic identification with the political-liberal statement of the problem for which legitimation by constitution is proposed as a solution these exchanges consider the perceived difficulties arguably standing in the way of this proposal s fulfillment on terms consistent with political liberalism s defining ideas about political justification. The authors discuss the mysteries of a democratic constituent power; the tensions between government-by-the-people and government-by-consent; the challenges posed to concretization by judicial authorities of national constitutional law; and the magnification of these tensions and challenges under the lenses of ambition towards transnational legal ordering. These discussions engage with other leading contemporary theorists of liberal-democratic constitutionalism including Bruce Ackerman Ronald Dworkin and Jürgen Habermas.