Abstract
Constitutions are both a cause of, and solution to, indeterminacies in public discourse. They are central to our understanding of state power, civic freedom, and, hence, policy influence for judges. This chapter finds evidence of a “new constitutionalism” that has been theorised (Stone Sweet, Governing with Judges: Constitutional Politics in Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; Gill and Cutler, New Constitutionalism and World Order, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2014). We will be searching through the contents and language in all available constitutions to uncover what, in fact, is “new”, and what might be considered to have been “older” approaches to constituting a polity.
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Notes
- 1.
Of course, non-binary classifications of executive type also exist. See, in particular, Siaroff (2003).
- 2.
A notable exception being Lijphart (2012).
- 3.
See theoretical work on post-structuralism and discourse analysis in, for example, Lyotard et al. (2006).
- 4.
Data for these comparisons was obtained from the Comparative Constitutions Project and Constitute Project from https://comparativeconstitutionsproject.org/ccp-rankings/, accessed from September 2018 to September 2021. See also Elkins et al. (2014).
- 5.
Data from the World Bank.
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Williams, M. (2022). The “New Constitutionalism” in 187 Countries. In: Judges and the Language of Law. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91495-0_3
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