GPPi participates in workshop on global constitutionalism
On 18 – 19 July 2013, GPPi Visiting Researcher Jahel Queralt participated in a conference titled “Global Constitutionalism: Legal Concepts and Emerging Transnational Orders.” The conference was hosted at the Technische Universistät Dresden as part of a research project on constitutionalism led by Hans Vorländer with funding from the German Research Foundation.
The conference focused on the “interpretative turn” in the discourse on global constitutionalism and explored possibilities for interdisciplinary, comparative research. This turn refers to the idea that a constitution should not be seen as an overarching institution that organizes a polity “from above,” but rather as an instrument that rules “from within” through cosmopolitan interpretive practices.
The conference included six panels that addressed the main following questions. Are post-national constitutionalisms able to tell powerful stories as classical constitutionalism did? Do they have their founding myths and narrative legacies? Does the EU as a post-national constitutional project rest on a new constitutional narrative? How distant are recent constitutional conceptions from ordinary people’s legal imagination? Are they confined to an elite discourse that reflects the reasoning of judges and legal experts?
During her panel, Queralt commented on a presentation by Alon Harel of Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Harel addressed the question “why constitutional rights matter?” Harel and Queralt shared the panel with Markus Patberg of Universität Hamburg and Kerstin Budde of Technische Universistät Dresden.
Harel argued that states should constitutionalize rights regardless of whether doing so will lead to greater or more effective protection of those rights. The value of constitutional entrenchment of rights lies in the fact that it leads to public acknowledgment that protecting citizens’ rights is not just a gesture but a duty. Harel used this premise to explain and rationalize the existence of unenforceable directives in contemporary constitutions.
Queralt used several examples of the Spanish and American constitutions to argue for a purely instrumental justification of the constitutional entrenchment of rights. Her main argument was that, to the extent that individuals are morally entitled to certain goods, we should organize our legal systems so that they can have access to these goods. The type of legal or bureaucratic procedure through which we secure this access should be the one that is most effective.