The Revival of Constituent Power?
Since the large-scale political transformations of the 1990s, we have been witnessing a revival of the category of constituent power – broadly understood as the democratic right of ‘the people’ to make and change constitutions. More recently, this shift has been met with scepticism. Today’s challenges to the concept hold it responsible for the erosion of constitutional democracies through populist and authoritarian mobilisation. At the same time, democratic movements within and outside Europe have formulated their demands in the language of constituent power, claiming legitimacy for acts of constitutional contestation and renewal. The Oxford Handbook of Constituent Power (OUP, 2026; eds. P. Niesen, M. Patberg, L. Rubinelli) examines the intellectual roots as well as paradigmatic agents, sites, and manifestations of constituent power today. The roundtable brings together experts in the field to discuss a key contention of the handbook – namely, that the category of constituent power is indispensable to explain and evaluate contemporary conflicts about political legitimacy, especially, but not exclusively, in federal and transnational polities such as the United Kingdom and the European Union.
Meet our speakers and chair
Erin F. Delaney is the Inaugural Director of the Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism and the Leverhulme Professor of Comparative Constitutional Law at University College London. Her scholarship explores constitutionalism in comparative perspective, with a particular focus on judicial legitimacy. Her work on judicial power and judicial design addresses both the “countermajoritarian difficulty” of an unelected judiciary and the constitutional aspiration of limitations on majoritarian democracy. For her article, The Federal Case for Judicial Review, about courts in federal systems, she was named the 2022 Federal Scholar in Residence at the Institution for Comparative Federalism (EURAC Research) in Italy, and she has held the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in the Theory and Practice of Constitutionalism and Federalism at McGill University. Other areas of interest include the influence of Empire on the development and maintenance of democratic constitutionalism, as well as colonial and post-colonial constitutionalism more broadly.
Oliver Garner is a Lecturer in Law at City Law School, City St George’s, University of London from September 2025. He previously held positions at the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law, British Institute of International and Comparative Law and the Central European University Democracy Institute. He completed his LL.M. and Ph.D. at the European University Institute and holds a BA Jurisprudence from the University of Oxford. Oliver’s fields of research are EU law and UK constitutional law and he teaches Public Law, EU Law, and Immigration Law in the City Law School. His first monograph Constitutional Disintegration and Disruption: Withdrawal and Opt-Outs from the European Union was published in May 2025 by Oxford University Press. He has published articles, book reviews, and editorials in the European Law Review, the Cambridge Yearbook of European Legal Studies, the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Perspectives on Federalism, Les Cahiers Portalis, and the European Journal of Legal Studies.
Martin Loughlin is Professor of Law, Emeritus Professor of Public Law at LSE. He was educated at LSE, the University of Warwick and Harvard Law School and held chairs at the Universities of Glasgow and Manchester before returning to LSE in 2000. He was a member of the Editorial Committee of The Modern Law Review from 1987 to 2010, serving as General Editor between 2002-07, and now sits on its Advisory Board. Martin was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2011 and in 2015 was awarded an honorary LL.D. by the University of Edinburgh. He has held research fellowships at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2007-8), Princeton University (20012-13), Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (2016-17), Edinburgh Law School (2019) and Yale Law School (2023) and been a Visiting Professor at several law schools including Osgoode Hall, Paris II, Pennsylvania, Renmin University (Beijing), and Toronto.
Markus Patberg is Research Associate in Political Theory at the University of Hamburg. From April 2026, he will take up a position as Professor of Political Theory and History of Ideas at the University of Greifswald. He has worked as an interim professor at the University of Münster and at FU Berlin. He has held visiting positions at University College London, the London School of Economics and Political Science and the University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Patberg's research interests lie in the areas of democratic theory, constitutional theory, and international political theory. He is the author of Constituent Power in the European Union (Oxford University Press, 2020). His current projects deal with the legitimacy of exit from international institutions and the digital transformation of democracy.
Carmen Pavel is Reader in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at King’s College London. She specialises in political philosophy and the history of political thought. Her interests include the philosophy of international law, liberal theory and contemporary challenges to it, and ethics and public policy. She received her PhD from Brown University and then served as a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer in the Program in Political Philosophy, Policy and Law at University of Virginia and subsequently at the University of Arizona. At King’s, Dr Pavel has served as the first director of the PPE programme from 2015-2018 and has contributed substantively to its re-design. She has published two books with Oxford University Press, Divided Sovereignty (2015) and Law Beyond the State: Dynamic Coordination, State Consent and Binding International Law (2021)
Jonathan White is Professor of Politics and Deputy Head of the European Institute at LSE, where he researches and teaches on democracy, political thought and political theory. He joined LSE as Lecturer in September 2008, after completing his PhD at the European University Institute in Florence. He has held visiting positions at Harvard, Stanford, the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Humboldt University, Hertie School, Sciences Po in Paris and the Australian National University. Before his PhD he was a research fellow at the Czech Institute of International Relations in Prague, and a lecturer at universities in the Czech Republic and Albania. Books include In the Long Run: the Future as a Political Idea (Profile, 2024), Politics of Last Resort: Governing by Emergency in the European Union (Oxford University Press, 2019), The Meaning of Partisanship (with Lea Ypi, Oxford University Press, 2016) and Political Allegiance after European Integration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). He was the recipient of the 2017 British Academy Brian Barry Prize for excellence in political science, and has received best-article prizes from the European Journal of International Relations (2023) and Political Studies (2015). He has also written for The Guardian, New Statesman and Boston Review.
Mike Wilkinson is Professor of Law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of Authoritarian Liberalism and the Transformation of Modern Europe (OUP 2021) and co-editor (with Marco Goldoni) of the Handbook on the Material Constitution (CUP 2023).
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