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Constitutional rights protect individuals "vertically" against government overreach, but may also regulate legal relations "horizontally" among private parties in most legal systems. In every constitutional system with judicially enforceable constitutional rights, courts must make choices about whether, when, and how to give those rights horizontal effect. This book is about those choices and their consequences. It offers three case studies, of Germany, the United States, and Canada, showing how the choices courts make about horizontal rights reflect existing normative and political realities and, over time, help to shape new ones.

Constitutional rights protect individuals against government overreaching, but that is not all they do. In different ways and to different degrees, constitutional rights also regulate legal relations among private parties in most legal systems. In other words, rights can have not only a vertical effect, within the hierarchical relationship between citizen and state, but also a horizontal one, on the citizen-to-citizen relationships otherwise governed by private law. In every constitutional system with judicially enforceable constitutional rights, courts must make choices about whether, when, and how to give those rights horizontal effect. This text is about how different courts make those choices, and about the consequences that they have.

Emoluments is the word of the hour again in the United States. The past week saw the filing of two new lawsuits alleging that President Trump has violated one or more of the Constitution's emoluments clauses by accepting payments and other benefits from foreign and domestic governments. What's significant about the new suits is who the plaintiffs are. One is brought by the state of Maryland and Washington, D.C., the other by 196 members of Congress, all Democrats. Are these the plaintiffs who can get a court to rule, for the first time ever, on what "emolument" means as used in the Constitution?