Reconsidering Constitutional Formation II Decisive Constitutional Normativity from Old Liberties to New Precedence Studies in the History of Law and Justice
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Studies in the History of Law and Justice 12 Series Editors: Mortimer Sellers · Georges Martyn Ulrike Müßig Editor Reconsidering Constitutional Formation II Decisive Constitutional Normativity From Old Liberties to New Precedence Studies in the History of Law and Justice Volume 12 Series editors Mortimer Sellers University of Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland, USA Georges Martyn Legal History Institute, University of Ghent, Gent, Belgium Editorial Board António Pedro Barbas Homem, Universidade de Lisboa Emanuele Conte, Università degli Studi Roma Tre Gigliola di Renzo Villata, Università degli Studi di Milano Markus Dirk Dubber, University of Toronto William Ewald, University of Pennsylvania Law School Igor Filippov, Moscow State University Amalia Kessler, Stanford University Mia Korpiola, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies Aniceto Masferrer, Universidad de Valencia Yasutomo Morigiwa, Nagoya University Graduate School of Law Ulrike Müßig, Universität Passau Sylvain Soleil, Université de Rennes James Q. Whitman, Yale Law School The purpose of this book series is to publish high quality volumes on the history of law and justice. Legal history can be a deeply provocative and influential field, as illustrated by the growth of the European universities and the ius commune, the French Revolution, the American Revolution, and indeed all the great movements for national liberation through law. The study of history gives scholars and reformers the models and cour- age to question entrenched injustices, by demonstrating the contingency of law and other social arrangements. Yet legal history today finds itself diminished in the universities and legal academy. Too often scholarship betrays no knowledge of what went before, or why legal institutions took the shape they did. This series seeks to remedy that deficiency. Studies in the History of Law and Justice will be theoretical and reflective. Volumes will address the history of law and justice from a critical and comparative viewpoint. The studies in this series will be strong bold narratives of the develop- ment of law and justice. Some will be suitable for a very broad readership. Contributions to this series will come from scholars on every continent and in every legal system. Volumes will promote international comparisons and dialogue. The purpose will be to provide the next generation of lawyers with the models and narratives needed to understand and improve the law and justice of their own era. The series includes monographs focusing on a specific topic, as well as collec- tions of articles covering a theme or collections of article by one author. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11794 Ulrike Müßig Editor Reconsidering Constitutional Formation II Decisive Constitutional Normativity From Old Liberties to New Precedence This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no. 339529. ReConFort is a research project in the field of legal history (ERC-AG-SH6 - ERC Advanced Grant—The study of the human past). The positions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official opinion of the ERC or the European Commission. Editor Ulrike Müßig Advanced Grantee of the ERC (ReConFort) University of Passau Passau Germany ISSN 2198-9842 ISSN 2198-9850 (electronic) Studies in the History of Law and Justice ISBN 978-3-319-73036-3 ISBN 978-3-319-73037-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73037-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017962550 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018. This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adap- tation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publi- cation does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Printed on acid-free paper This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland To the KUS voyagers including Christoph, crossing the Atlantic on the Thor Heyerdahl (October 2017–April 2018) Acknowledgements This second volume is part of the journey, funded by the ERC Advanced Grant ReConFort. The physical journey in relation to the key category ‘precedence of constitution’ started with the international conference on ‘Grondwettelijke voorrang— Precedence of Constitution’ at the Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Science and the Arts, Brussels, on March 14, 2016, which was supported by the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the CORE Network and facilitated by Dirk Heirbaut and Dave De ruysscher. The Rt. Hon. Lord Robert Reed (United Kingdom Supreme Court, London) opened the conference with his presentation on the sensitivities of common law, viz., the law of the European Union. Facing the beginning of Britain’s negotiations concerning its withdrawal from the Union the immemorial custom reasoning of the common law bridges the pretended gap by indicating Britain’s connections with the European constitutionalism via eighteenth-century America. It was the British-American discursive common law community where the American history of establishing the Constitution as law, up to the landmark case of Marbury v. Madison in 1803 started from. Every journey requires a profound orientation. The compass for the ReConFort research presented here, as indicated by the title Decisive Constitutional Normativity, was the discourse-related analysis concerning how contemporaries communicated the constituting of the whole political order as a legal order. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the ‘new’ normativity was not invented in one precise moment. Rather, it often emerged from long and intensive debates of the ‘old’ concepts of fundamental rights. As Principal Investigator, my contri- bution to this volume, ‘A new order of the ages (Novus ordo seclorum)’, provides the map for the ReConFort research approach to the relevant discourses. That is why it analyzes in detail the American discourse, its commonalities with the ‘old’ common law theory of the seventeenth century, and the departure from the Anglo-American transatlantic discursive community in 1776, and the ‘replacement’ of common law with natural law. The French discourse, in contrast, emerged out of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789, reaching for the philosophical universality as ‘Le but de toute institution politique.’ The Rousseauist vii viii Acknowledgements understanding of law as the expression of the volonté générale and, consequently, of freedom to participate in legislation (Art. 6) was totally unknown to the American colonies’ legal argumentation. Instead, they conducted their ‘case’ as though it were a common law litigation. Whereas the American resistors differ- entiated constitutional law and ordinary law conceptually in their effort to justify the revolution as legitimate, French discourse allows, even today, no review of statutes for unconstitutionality except for the narrow scope of the ‘prior question of con- stitutionality’ (question prioritaire de constitutionnalité, QPC), dealing with the a posteriori control of promulgated statutes being compatible with the rights and liberties guaranteed by the current French constitution in Art. 61–1. A comprehensive history of constitutional precedence was never ReConFort’s intention. ReConFort’s concentration on the historic discourses makes sense pre- cisely because the contemporary models of constitutional precedence are already visible: the English ‘negative’ model, with no constitutional precedence due to the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty hindering any hierarchy of public laws; the American model, with the theory of constitutional precedence proclaimed in Art. VI clause 2 of the United States Constitution of 1787 but with no provision at either federal or state level of how to implement this precedence (this finally being introduced by the United States Supreme Court over fifteen years later in Marbury v. Madison); the French model of venerating the volonté