Prof Jo Murkens

This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time), MSc in Law and Finance and University of Pennsylvania Law School LLM Visiting Students. This course is available with permission as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit. This course uses controlled access as part of the course selection process. For information on controlled access courses, including eligibility, application processes, deadlines, and departmental contact details, please refer to the Controlled Access Courses webpage.

How to apply: Priority will be given initially to LLM, MSc Regulation and MSc Law and Finance students on a first-come-first-served allocation.

Spaces permitting, requests from all other students will be processed on the same first-come-first-served allocation from 10am on Thursday 1 October 2026

By submitting an application, students are confirming that they meet any pre-requisites specified. Providing an additional written statement will not aid a student's chances of being accepted onto a course, and statements are not read.

Deadline for application: Not applicable

For queries contact: Law.llm@lse.ac.uk

Constitutional authority is never simply given. It must be created, sustained, and defended – and it can be lost. LL4Z6 examines the foundations, operation, and vulnerability of constitutional orders across multiple jurisdictions, asking not merely how constitutions are designed but whether, and under what conditions, they work.

Part I develops the theoretical and historical foundations of the discipline. It examines the classical problems of constitutional authority – constituent power, separation of powers, and legitimacy – before tracing how those problems are resolved (or deferred) through different models of constitutional design. It then investigates the historical origins of judicial review in England and the United States, the reconstruction of constitutional orders in France and Germany after 1945, and the global expansion of rights-based adjudication in the post-war period. Students are equipped with the conceptual tools – normativist, decisionist, and democratic – needed to analyse constitutional orders critically rather than descriptively.

Part II subjects those foundations to stress. It examines constitutional change and the conditions under which amendment becomes rupture; the structural tensions of presidentialism, executive power, and emergency government; and the contemporary phenomenon of constitutional backsliding, including court-packing, jurisdiction-stripping, and the rhetorical delegitimation of judicial independence. The course concludes by asking what institutional features enable courts and constitutions to survive political pressure – and when they do not.

Throughout, the course develops a critical perspective on constitutional idealism: the assumption that formal constitutional arrangements reliably constrain political power or reliably produce democratic outcomes. Rather than treating constitutions as normative constraints on politics, LL4Z6 approaches them as sites of ongoing contestation – between institutions, between generations, and between competing visions of democratic authority. Students are encouraged to make independent connections across legal, political, and philosophical traditions, and to assess constitutional orders not only by their design but by their resilience under pressure.

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

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

One 2,000-word essay.

There is not a set book for this course. All materials will be made available in advance on Moodle/Leganto.

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