God(s) Over Constitution

Auteur

Larry Catá Backer is Professor of Law at the Dickinson School of Law at the Pennsylvania State University. Previously he served as Executive Director of the Comparative and International Law Center at the University of Tulsa. He is the author of several books, including most recently Transnational Law and Legal Problems: An Introduction to the Field (Carolina Academic Press, 2009) and Corporate Governance, Financial Markets, and Development: The Convergence of Public and Private Law (Edward Elgar, 2009).

Texte du rabat

This book analyzes the movement from ethnic or nationalist constitutions to transnational constitutionalism, and focuses on the rise of theocratic systems challenging the orthodoxy of the secular post-World War II supra-constitutionalist project. Author Larry Catá Backer provides a new and unique framework for understanding this new constitutionalism, and proposes a more useful way of understanding the great conflicts between the secular and theocratic approaches to it.

Résumé
This book focuses on the two great shifts in constitutionalist thinking during the last century: the remaking of constitutionalism from a tool of state power to an attempt to systematize, institutionalize, and implement an international higher law; and the rejection of this development by transcendent, universalist, autonomous religious communities and their efforts to displace secular universalist normative frameworks with transcendent religious frameworks no less universal. Author Larry Catá Backer analyzes the movement from ethnic or nationalist constitutions to transnational constitutionalism, and then turns his focus to the rise of religiously based or theocratic systems challenging the orthodoxy of the secular post-World War II supra-constitutionalist project. The book further examines the implications of these seismic movements in global constitutionalism, both at the level of constitutional theory and at the "as-applied" level of the law of the constitution now possible within states. Backer looks closely at a number of constitutions recently enacted in Muslim-majority and Marxist-Leninist states from the perspective of this ideological constitutionalism developed in the book, and does so from outside the usual Western view that tends to explain these constitutional experiments solely in relation to their conformity with the norms, values and methods of Western constitutions. In all, God(s) Over Constitution provides a new and unique framework for understanding this new constitutionalism, and proposes a more useful way of understanding the great conflicts between the secular and theocratic approaches to it.

Contenu

1. Introduction; 2. The Constitution Before the Gods: The Traditional Constitution; 3. The Gods Arise: Transnational Constitutionalism;
   4. The Gods Acquire Form: The Normative Structure of Constitutionalism and Its Mechanics; 5. Testing the System: Policing Soft Coups in Honduras 2009; Brazil 2016, and Venezuela 2017; 6. The Other Gods: Constitutional Theocracy or Theocratic Constitutionalism? 7. The Other Gods: Authoritarian Constitutionalism; 8. Blowback: Constitutionalism, the Traditional State, and Emerging Global Orders; 9. Looking Forward: The Future of Constitutionalism in a Larger Context