This Article contributes toward the growing body of literature addressing the burgeoning gap between normative and empirical accounts of constitutional change in the constitutional order of the European Union. It does so by shining a light on how the European Parliament, acting through its unilateral procedural rule making powers, has managed to wield its limited formal constitutional clout to alter the balance of powers between the core Union institutions, and to define its own role in the development of the political component to the EU’s constitutional culture. Given the European Parliament cannot be dissolved, and given there is at least the potential for such rule making power to be put to unconstitutional ends, the Article also considers the extent to which judicial oversight of this particular form of informal constitutional change is possible, and the form it may take should the validity of a particular procedural rule be challenged.

Chile’s pension privatization represents one of the most radical neoliberal experiments in social security reform, reshaping welfare from a collective right into a market-driven, property-based entitlement. This Article examines how the constitutionalization of pension privatization entrenched inequalities, shielding the system from democratic contestation and embedding a logic of over-propertization, where private property rights supersede social rights. Drawing on a Law and Political Economy (LPE) approach, explicitly concerned with the distributional consequences of legal design, this study traces how, during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–90), Chile’s 1980 Constitution, and Decree Law 3500 institutionalized financialization and individual responsibility, transforming social security into an asset class managed by private pension fund administrators (AFPs). By legally structuring private capitalization accounts as financial assets with attributes such as ownership, transferability, and enforceability, these frameworks granted private actors control over investment management and risk distribution. The analysis highlights challenges to reversing this model, as judicial claims, pension fund withdrawals during COVID-19, and two failed constitution-making processes reveal legal and political constraints on reform. It examines legislative efforts, judicial interpretations, and collective mobilizations—such as the No+AFP campaign—seeking to restore solidarity. It also explores legitimation strategies, including the discourse of “popular capitalism” and the institutional entrenchment of AFPs within Chile’s political economy. By framing pension privatization as a constitutional and legal project rather than mere economic policy, this Article underscores the global consequences of over-propertization and the urgency of reimagining social rights. In doing so, it contributes to a growing body of LPE scholarship that treats constitutions as terrains of economic power, exposing how legal frameworks both encode and contest neoliberal orders.

The promise of cleansing judiciaries of judges who are unfit for democracy and rule of law paradigms has been central to judicial reforms for European post-communist countries approaching the Europe they imagined. Thrice already in the past 30 years, Central Eastern European (CEE) and Southeastern European countries (SEE) applied extraordinary accountability mechanisms for judges. The latter promised to be the exceptional and ultimate stretch for the judiciaries, a one-time necessary precondition for them to be able to transition out of the past and into the ‘fully fledged independent and accountable’ judiciary prescribed transnationally. From one round of judicial reforms to another, shaped by different requirements of transitional societies in Europe, judicial cleansing operations have returned to fix the same persisting problem of judicial integrity-building. This article aims to show these measures are not to be exclusively relied upon to instate sustainable independent and accountable courts, precisely because of the risks related to their extraordinary nature, their problematic rule of law exceptions, and the leeway for abuse they create in critical junctures as products and enablers of transition.

The widespread rise of renting unaffordability and gentrification across European cities has drawn attention to the social unsustainability of heavily financialized and privatized housing markets. Indeed, contemporary patterns of standardization and depoliticization of housing crises collide with the increasingly pronounced functional equivalence between tenancies and home-owning, as well as with future urbanization prospects. The Article departs from an understanding of housing crises as by-products of inter alia property relations to examine two distinct clusters of constitutional tension that define the European housing landscape. It then details the recalibration of renting profitability and the regulatory or “soft” asymmetrization of housing governance as defining features of a post- or counter-neoliberal movement within property’s constitutional politics. While profitability relativism readily aligns with the basic tenets of European social constitutionalism, the plural resistances of constitutional governance structures to the localist repoliticization of housing crises urges fresh thinking around the shifting geographies of urban homeownership politics.

The proportionality between crime and punishment is made, and the way it is made makes for a certain kind of criminal law. By analyzing how punitive measures are justified in Swedish criminal law and crime policy through appeals to proportionality, the Article demonstrates how proportionality has been made and remade to legitimize an increasingly punitive crime policy, obscuring the reasons for these legislative changes. The Article thus calls for the principle of proportionality to be dismantled and employs a discursive approach to reverse-engineer claims of proportionality in Swedish legislative proposals. The purpose of this approach is to make visible the meanings and limits of the contemporary crime policy understanding of crime, punishment, and a just criminal law.

Current scholarship often views international environmental law (IEL) through a crisis or ambition lens. The “crisis lens” apologizes for the limitations of doctrinal methods in resolving disputes. The “ambition lens” seeks to align IEL with a planetary perspective but is criticized for utopianism. We offer a social-systems-theoretical alternative. IEL’s ability to learn and adapt to social change also depends on sustaining law’s function of stabilizing expectations. This constitutes the core of Luhmann’s theory of operative closure. We devise three hypotheses to reconstruct IEL’s operative closure and apply them to the South China Sea. Hypothesis 1: Environmental impact assessment norms address the problem of contingency management. Hypothesis 2: Due diligence norms address the problem of confidence maintenance. Hypothesis 3: Cooperation norms address the problem of trust retention. Our analysis shows that reconstructing IEL’s operative closure reveals its societal responsiveness. This presents a new critical lens for observing IEL’s social phenomena.

The Drittwirkung determined the discussion on the impact of fundamental rights on private relations, significantly influencing the dogmatics of fundamental rights and the paradigm of their application in Germany. The current state of development of the Drittwirkung is a result of a dialogue over the course of several decades in German academia between the Federal Constitutional Court and legal scholars, who point out the dogmatic deficiencies of this concept. The development of the problem of the phenomenon in question in the jurisprudence of the FCC progressed along two lines. Firstly, it consisted of the dogmatization of the Drittwirkung, as this is how the process of the clarification of the conditions for the radiating impact of fundamental rights can be described in its subsequent rulings. Secondly, the efforts of the FCC were aimed at searching for solutions alternative to Drittwirkung, which could justify the horizontal application of fundamental rights norms. The article reconstructs the dogmatization process of Drittwirkung with reference to the key rulings in the development of this concept. It presents a possible account of the relationship between Drittwirkung and Schutzpflichten. Finally, it argues in favour of a reorientation of the doctrine of the Drittwirkung, framing the horizontal application of fundamental rights as an interpretation in accordance with the constitution.

The concept of heteronomy, as developed by Kant, has long remained underutilized in constitutional theory. The present article takes as its point of departure Kant’s transcendental formulation of the balance between autonomy and heteronomy as a crucial element in the safeguarding of individual freedom and the integrity of the constitutional order. Kant developed his argument in two stages. In the transcendental, ahistorical stage, he constructs autonomy as a form of self-binding to certain universal maxims, which renders his constitutional theory a duty-based one, in which moral autonomy amounts to self-heteronomy. At this juncture, Kant maintains his principled objection to constitutional heteronomy as reflected in his argument about majority-decision, his rationale for a system of separation of powers that ensures legislative supremacy, and his anti-paternalistic account of law. In the pragmatic, historical stage, Kant’s arguments appear to have been shaped by his engagement with the political developments of the late 18th century. The adoption of an anthropological mode of thought led his constitutional theory to evolve towards a form of coercive heteronomy. A number of paternalistic attitudes can then be identified, including Kant’s endorsement of monarchy as a superior route to republicanism, his argument for constrained republican representation without universal right to vote, and his opposition to the right to resist oppression. While this article aims to provide an internal critique of Kant’s theory of constitutional heteronomy, it also underscores the timeliness of his contribution to the field, as it sheds early light on one of the formative dilemmas that continues to plague liberal constitutionalism today.

This Article brings together two important concepts in international law scholarship that have thus far been studied in isolation from each other: reputation and interpretation. Interesting insights lie hidden in their overlap. While interpretation is still commonly perceived as a sterile exercise in “legal logic,” the Article suggests that it is often better studied as a social practice, within which the relationships between the interpreters that are arguing with each other frequently matter as much as the arguments themselves. The Article therefore suggests a new way of looking at interpretation in international law: Interpretation as a practice of reputation management, where collective actors like states present themselves to others in the interpretations they adopt, and are evaluated by various audiences on the basis of these interpretations. The main argument can be summarized like this: If international law is relatively indeterminate, interpretation is a situated choice. By making that choice, an interpreter reveals something fundamental about itself to its audiences. Interpreters therefore carefully manage their interpretive expressions out of a desire to be well-regarded by these audiences. This phenomenon of reputation management has important implications for the practice of interpretation in international law.

This Article examines the evolving concept of the material constitution and its application to the EU. The first part focuses on the theory of Italian jurist Costantino Mortati, exploring both its foundations and its contemporary relevance. Mortati’s understanding of the material constitution—deeply rooted in the framework of the modern nation-state—faces significant challenges when extended to supranational entities such as the EU. The second part turns to the work of Riccardo Monaco, who reimagined constitutional normativity in light of European integration. His analysis highlights the dynamic, institutional character of the European Communities’ legal order. The Article traces how the concept of the material constitution has been adapted—and ultimately transformed—within transnational contexts. This transformation reveals both the concept’s interpretive value and the theoretical tensions involved in applying it beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. In particular, it underscores the normative significance of the ECs’ underlying political economy.

There has been increasing attention both at national and international level to demands of reparations for historic injustices—colonialism, enslavement and the transatlantic chattel slave trade—and the role and relevance of international law in this context. A routinely identified legal obstacle to reparation demands is the doctrine of intertemporal law, which is generally interpreted to require past acts to be considered in the light of the law contemporary with them. This interpretation of the intertemporal doctrine has been contested more recently in international legal scholarship and practice, which both seek to instill an increased sense of ambiguity into the laws of the past, but crucially, this Article shows, these efforts do not extend this ambiguity to the doctrine of intertemporal law itself. This Article takes a closer look at the intertemporal doctrine and interrogates these varying interpretations. It analyses both conventional and critical international legal scholarship on the intertemporal doctrine in the context of reparation claims for historic injustices and contrasts them to the scholarly reception of the intertemporal doctrine in the past and selected cases from the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”), arguing that whilst an often–unquestioned static understanding of intertemporality prevails, more dynamic interpretations of the doctrine also exist. By building on these legal arguments that enshrine a less static relationship between past and present laws within the discipline of international law—including ICJ decisions, judges’ dissenting opinions, states’ arguments, and critical legal scholarship—the Article defends a potentially emancipatory interpretive approach to the doctrine that could reframe it so as to support, rather than hinder, reparation claims for historic injustices in international law.

This Article offers a first comparative analysis of the evolution of U.S. corporate personhood doctrine and the “freedom to conduct a business” under Article 16 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. It argues that, over the past fifty years, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) have both contributed to the rise of neoliberalism by using these legal doctrines to shield market mechanisms from democratic intervention. While SCOTUS has expanded and deepened corporate personhood, granting new and more powerful protections under free speech and religious freedom to corporations, the CJEU has similarly interpreted the “freedom to conduct a business” to weaken labor protections and different market regulations. This unexpected convergence contrasts with the CJEU’s ostensibly social mission and underscores the dangers of an uncritical expansion of Article 16. But despite this shared goal, this Article highlights the divergence in the approaches of SCOTUS and the CJEU through insights from comparative political economy. Differences in legal mobilization, the role of courts in political disputes, and the political economy of industrial relations have shaped each doctrine’s development. These findings are useful for legal reformers developing different strategies to curb corporate power in both jurisdictions.