The book of judges: reoccupation, religion, and constitutional adjudication at the origins of the US Supreme Court (1789-1935) and the German Federal Constitutional Court (1951-1969)

Presentation (2022, November 18)

Franklin D. Roosevelt recommended that “like the Bible, [the Constitution] ought to be read again and again.” Gustav Heinemann portrayed the Grundgesetz as a “great offering” whose words must become flesh ... [more ▼]

Franklin D. Roosevelt recommended that “like the Bible, [the Constitution] ought to be read again and again.” Gustav Heinemann portrayed the Grundgesetz as a “great offering” whose words must become flesh. Nevertheless, does this have any bearing on constitutional adjudication? Although presidents didn’t – and more and more don’t – shy about handling their respective constitutions as bibles, have justices and constitutional scholars proceeded otherwise? Common wisdom may answer yes, they did. The aim of my study is to show that this is not quite the case. I pursue it in reference to two leading liberal democratic constitutional courts, the US Supreme Court and the German Federal Constitutional Court. This happens in three parts: (1) I will engage with court architecture, understood as a testimony to each institution’s articulation for self-justification and self-empowerment; (2) the semantic consecration of constitutional adjudication especially regarding politics, as it took place in the struggles over what was implied by the innovations pushed forward in the contexts of Marbury v. Madison, on the one hand, and of the German Constitutional Court’s Status-Denkschrift, on the other; (3) and legal-methodological debates on the relationship between the Christian Bible and constitutional provisions that run in parallel and connection to these two landmark events. My findings point out that by dint of the disruptive social development that the differentiation between law and politics was and is, constitutional actors in the 19th century United States and 20th century Germany frequently, if not invariably, relied upon religious resources to embed their positions. I interpret this reliance using Hans Blumenberg's phenomenology of history and epochal thresholds and his theory of reoccupations. [less ▲]

A lawful of canons

Presentation (2022, June 24)

Fulfilling Nomos before the Law: On Thanos Zarthaloudis' The Birth of Nomos

in Parrhesia: Critical Journal of Philosophy (2022), 35

Creatures of reason: the imminence of constitutional courts in liberal democracies

Presentation (2021, December 06)

Rational Necessities: on the Silence of Liberal Democratic Theory in Front of the Unreasonable Other

in Etica e Politica (2021), 23(2), 467-480

To take or think history seriously, The Concept of Liberal Democratic Law tells us, is to comprehend it as a constant process of denaturalization. Having presented us with a conception of history as an on ... [more ▼]

To take or think history seriously, The Concept of Liberal Democratic Law tells us, is to comprehend it as a constant process of denaturalization. Having presented us with a conception of history as an on-going earthquake that ruins and denaturalizes everything, does Van der Walt not in the end step back from this seismic vision of history? This engagement seeks to circumscribe this question in the textual body of The Concept of Liberal Democratic Law. It does so under the auspices of the following bet: to submit one’s literary enterprise as a reading is tantamount to submit one’s work to a process of denaturalization. After all, in other interpretations, the text does not live on. Interpretation marks off the text’s posteriority, its after-life. Therefore, by interrogating the way the text posits its possible readership, declaring silence to the foreseeable unreasonable reader, arguably one makes room to evaluate whether the text’s representation of what liberal democracy is about does not end up being a dissemblance between its maxim and practice when it declares that before an unreasonable reader, the discussion must come to an end. [less ▲]

O presente fugidio das crises constitucionais: uma interrogação acerca da questão concernindo a Modernidade da Constituição

in Revista Direito e Práxis (2021)

Constitutional crises are denounced now and then. Even if one notices a decrease in the capacity of this concept to ignite popular mobilization, as there seems to be fewer persons inclined to go to the ... [more ▼]

Constitutional crises are denounced now and then. Even if one notices a decrease in the capacity of this concept to ignite popular mobilization, as there seems to be fewer persons inclined to go to the streets in defense of the Constitution in crisis, the concept of crisis retains, unquestionably, its importance, both rhetorically and historiographically. Nevertheless, a theory of constitutional crises remains absent. The present article proposes to confront this absence, interrogating the literature dedicated to the concept of constitutional crises, on the one hand, and questioning the meaning of this absence in its connection to the concept of the Constitution itself. [less ▲]