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This Element looks first at the fundamental principle of modernity that is the functional differentiation of society, and the emergence of autonomous, positive law. The careful architecture of differentiation, balance, and mutual performance between the legal, political and economic systems is jeopardised with the hypertrophy of any one of the structurally coupled systems at the expense of the others. The pathologies are described in the second section of the Element. It explores how, under conditions of globalisation, market thinking came to hoist itself to the position of privileged site of societal rationality. In the third section we look at what sustains law's own 'reflexive intelligence' under conditions of globalisation, and whether we can still rely today on the constitutional achievement to guarantee law's autonomy, its democratic credentials and its ability to reproduce normative expectations today

From a legal-philosophical point of view, The Redress of Law presents a critical analysis of a number of related doctrinal fields: constitutional, labour and EU Law. Focusing on the organisation and protection of work, this book asks what it means to protect work as an essential aspect of human (individual and collective) flourishing. This is an ambitious and highly sophisticated intervention in contemporary academic and political debates around a set of critically important questions connected to processes of globalisation and market integration. The author redefines the nature of legal and political thought in an age in which market rationality has exceeded its classic domain and has come to pervade the organization of social and political life. This restatement of critical legal theory is intended to defend the concept of constitutionalism and suggest new ways to deploy the law strategically

From a legal-philosophical point of view, The Redress of Law presents a critical analysis of a number of related doctrinal fields: constitutional, labour and EU Law. Focusing on the organisation and protection of work, this book asks what it means to protect work as an essential aspect of human (individual and collective) flourishing. This is an ambitious and highly sophisticated intervention in contemporary academic and political debates around a set of critically important questions connected to processes of globalisation and market integration. The author redefines the nature of legal and political thought in an age in which market rationality has exceeded its classic domain and has come to pervade the organization of social and political life. This restatement of critical legal theory is intended to defend the concept of constitutionalism and suggest new ways to deploy the law strategically.

Law and Reflexive Politics argues against the dominant recent `republican' trend in legal and democratic theory that sees law as the prime vessel of political action, means of empowerment of civil society and guarantor of democratic politics. Against theorists as diverse as Dworkin, Habermas, Unger, Ackerman and others it argues that the law cannot, as these theorists would have it, contain the politics of civil society and exhaust what these politics are about. The first part of the book explores the recent trends in legal and political theory that suggest the internal linking of democracy and law. The second part is a critique of these positions through an application of systems theory, but one that offers an internal critique of systems theory itself as well as a study of the inter-relationships between law, politics and conflict. The final part advances a suggestion for a definition, or re-conceptualisation, of the political as `reflexive', that will re-politicise law's rendering of conflict, political action and identity. What is `stilled' by the law here becomes contested terrain again and, as such, political

The paper is a review of Johan van der Walt's The Concept of Liberal Democratic Law. It proceeds through a genealogy of the articulations and alignments of the three terms – kosmos, physis, nomos – that form the backdrop of the book's main thesis. In a discussion of tragedy and of the natural philosophers (Anaximander) it argues that Greek thought sustained a deep unity of the practical, the ethical, and the aesthetic, and looks at van der Walt's interpretation and defence of public reason in that light.

AbstractThe paper is a critique of 'constitutional pluralism', as increasingly called upon to compensate for the social and democratic deficits of the European project, and of 'constitutionalisation' as compensating for the absence of any semblance of 'constituent power' at the European level. The substitution has been largely successful in redefining the terms of the debate. My interest in this paper, more specifically, is with constitutionalisation as a process of 'becoming-constitutional', the conditions of that process, and the criteria of ascription of constitutionality. My argument is that it involves a constitutive coupling with constitutional pluralism, such that allows even the current crisis to be portrayed as an 'opportunity' for Europe's alleged 'social market economy for the 21st century' to 'come out stronger', its progress at no point obstructed or derailed by the peoples' of Europe resistance to it.