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Constitutionalism in an Old Key: Legality and Constituent Powerby David Dyzenhaus I argue that legal and constitutional theory should avoid the idea of constituent power. It is unhelpful in seeking to understand the authority of law and the place of written constitutions in such an understanding. In particular, it results in a deep ambivalence about whether authority is located within or without the legal order. That ambivalence also manifests itself within positivist legal theory, which explains the affinity between theories of constituent power and legal positivist accounts of authority. Legal theory should then focus on the question of law's authority as one entirely internal to legal order, thus making the question of constituent power superfluous.
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This chapter mounts a defence of a liberal constitutionalism in which constitutional architecture is treated as eclipsing constituent power, not on the basis of the empirical inevitability of the legal taming of the political, but on account of the impossibility of developing normative accounts of how we might live together except on the basis of such a working assumption. Against Schmitt's claim that constitutional authority cannot escape its origins in constituent power, the chapter defends a liberal account of the rule of law.
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