LL243      Half Unit
Constitutionalism Beyond Courts

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

This course is a study of constitutional design, law, and politics from a comparative perspective. It has two distinctive features: first, the course goes beyond a focus on courts and legal norms. While constitutional courts will feature, they will do so as one of many constitutional actors that comprise a constitutional system. We will therefore also a study of other constitutional actors (such as legislatures, executives, bureaucracies, political parties, the opposition, monarchies, the military, and guarantor institutions such as electoral commissions, ombudsoffices, human rights and equality commissions, and anti-corruption bodies).   

Second, the course will seek to understand these non-judicial actors by adopting a comparative constitutional perspective. We will draw our examples not only from constitutionally influential jurisdictions (such as United States, United Kingdom, South Africa and Germany), but also from jurisdictions outside the ‘canon’ of comparative constitutional law, such as China, Iran, Australia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Hong Kong, Afghanistan, and Malaysia. This diverse jurisdictional lens should help us critique the dominant court-focused approach in Euro-American constitutional studies, and explore other possibilities of constitutional design.

2 hours of seminars in the Spring Term.
20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Winter Term.

2,000 word essay.

Adem Abebe, ‘Tackling Winner-Takes-All Politics in Africa: Inclusive Governance through Constitutional Empowerment of Opposition Parties’ in T Ginsburg et al eds, The Constitutional Design of Elections and Parties (forthcoming 2024) 

Dinesha Samararatne, ‘Sri Lanka’s Guarantor Branch’ in Swati Jhaveri et al eds, Constitutional Resilience Beyond Courts (2023) 

Tarun Khaitan, ‘Directive Principles and the Expressive Accommodation of Ideological Dissenters’ (2018) International Journal of Constitutional Law 389 

Ozan Varol, the Military as the Guardian of Constitutional Democracy, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law (2013) 

Mirjam Künkler and David S Law, ‘Islamic Constitutionalism: Iran’ in David Law, Constitutionalism in Context (2022) 

Yvonne Tew, ‘Monarchy and Democracy in Modern Malaysia’ in Ginsburg, Huq & Khaitan eds, The Entrenchment of Democracy (CUP 2025)

APDH v Cote D’Ivoire, African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (2016)

Movement for Democratic Change v Mashavira [2020] ZWSC 56 (Zimbabwe SC)

Exam (100%), duration: 150 Minutes in the Spring exam period