No abstract

This article examines the meaning and significance of the concept of constituent power in constitutional thought by showing how it acts as a boundary concept with respect to three types of legal thought: normativism, decisionism and relationalism. The concept can be fully appreciated, it suggests, only by adopting a relationalist method. This relationalist method permits us to deal with the paradoxical aspects of constitutional founding creatively and to grasp how constituent power, as the generative aspect of the political power relationship, works not only at founding moments but also within the dynamics of constitutional development. Relationalism realizes this ambition by exposing the tension between unity and hierarchy in constitutional foundation and the tension between the people-as-one and the people-as-the governed in the course of constitutional development. It contends, contrary to normativist claims, that constituent power remains a central concept of constitutional thought.

The article outlines a simple thesis: that international investment arbitration-pursuant to regional and bilateral investment treaties-offers the clearest example of global administrative law, strictly construed, yet to have emerged. We present this thesis by explicating four key features of investment treaties: they permit investor claims against the state without exhausting local remedies; they allow claims for damages; they allow investors to directly seek enforcement of awards before domestic courts; and they facilitate forum-shopping. Our argument is that, owing to this unique conjunction of features, the regulatory conduct of states is, to an unusual extent, subject to control through compulsory international adjudication. Having highlighted these features, we then claim that investment arbitration is best analogized to domestic administrative law rather than to international commercial arbitration, especially since investment arbitration engages disputes arising from the exercise of public authority by the state as opposed to private acts of the state. Further, we claim that the linkages between investment arbitration and domestic legal systems are more direct and more closely integrated than other forms of international adjudication in the public sphere. For these reasons, we argue that the emerging regime of investment arbitration is to be understood as constituting an important and powerful manifestation of global administrative law.

No abstract

This book offers an account of the formation of the discipline of public law with a view to identifying its essential character, explaining its particular modes of operation, and specifying its unique task. Public law is conceived broadly as a type of law that comes into existence as a consequence of the secularization, rationalization, and positivization of the medieval idea of fundamental law. Formed as a result of the changes that give birth to the modern state, public law establishes the authority and legitimacy of modern governmental ordering. Public law today is a universal phenomenon, but its origins are European. Part I of the book examines the conditions of its formation, showing how much the concept borrowed from the refined debates of medieval jurists. Part II then examines the nature of public law. Drawing on a line of juristic inquiry that developed from the late 16th to the early 19th centuries — extending from Bodin, Althusius, Lipsius, Grotius, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, and Pufendorf to the later works of Montesquieu, Rousseau, Kant, Fichte, Smith, and Hegel — it presents an account of public law as a special type of political reason. The remaining three parts unpack the core elements of this concept: state, constitution, and government. By explaining the way that these core elements of state, constitution, and government were shaped respectively by the technological, bourgeois, and disciplinary revolutions of the 16th–19th centuries, public law is revealed to be a subject of considerable ambiguity, complexity, and resilience.