In the economic and political science literature on constitutional choice and constitutional design, David Hume is almost invariably associated with a master principle of design that is congenial to rationalactor approaches. I shall call this the knavery principle. As Hume put it, "in contriving any system of government, and fixing the several checks and controuls of the constitution, every man...

The Sasang constitutional medicine (SCM), a medical tradition originating from Korea, is distinguished from the traditional Chinese medicine in its philosophical background, theoretical development and especially, the fundamental rationale that analyzes the structure and function of the human body within a quadrifocal scheme. In SCM, the structure of the body is comprehended within the Sasang q...

16 proportionality” which the German Constitutional Court developed in the 1950s and which since then has been treated as unwritten constitutional law in Germany. In the decades that followed the 1950s the German Constitutional Court realized that the principle of proportionality (commensurability) works like a representation of people’s moral sense and sense of justice. Therefore, the German C...

This article offers a framework for analysing the interrelationships between democratic accountability and constitutional implementation with specific reference to sub-Saharan Africa. It opens by noting the subject’s importance and the contested meaning of key terms, before proceeding to elaborate the significance that constitutional implementation and accountability have for one another. The m...

Political theorists tend to dismiss the concept of constitutional patriotism for two main reasons. On the one hand, constitutional patriotism — understood as a postnational, universalist form of democratic political allegiance — is rejected on account of its abstract quality. On the otherhand, it is argued that constitutional patriotism, while apprearing universalist, is in fact particular thro...

Beginning in 1999, a series of events generated speculation that the Chinese Party-state might be prepared to breathe new life into the country’s long dormant constitution. In recent years, as the Party-state has strictly limited constitutional adjudication and moved aggressively to contain some citizen constitutional activism, this early speculation has turned to pessimism about China’s consti...

Commonwealth Caribbean constitutions were famously likened by Francis Alexis to “birth certificates” – striking imagery that conveyed the paradigmatic shift occasioned at independence where written constitutions with entrenched Bills of Rights supposedly heralded the decline of parliamentary sovereignty. However, recent changes to Jamaica’s constitutional regime of fundamental rights, which ent...