We are sometimes told that the Declaration is an airy statement about individual rights, whereas the Constitution does the hard work of structuring a government. This Part argues that the Declaration is primarily concerned, not with individual rights, but with the structure of government. That is, how do we structure a government so that our rights are most reliably protected? And the answer is not as little government as possible, but a competently structured government, subject to the rule of law, that works for the benefit of the people.

AI applications are increasingly deployed in the judiciary for a wide array of tasks, denoted as ‘judicial AI’. The implications for the legal system are vast. In this chapter, I focus on the effects of judicial AI on the rule of law, given the judiciary’s essential role in safeguarding this value. After examining what is meant by the rule of law, three sets of questions guide my analysis. First, how does the turn from text-driven to code- and data-driven legal interpretation affect the nature of law? Is there a risk that instead of fostering the rule of law, this leads to algorithmic rule by law? Second, since AI applications are designed by human beings, delegating judicial tasks to AI implies a delegation to the coders developing it. To what extent can this result in a rule of coders? And last, what impact does judicial AI have on the separation of powers, given that the executive and legislative branch of power control the judiciary’s resources? Can it undermine the judiciary’s ability to check and balance the other branches of power? The answers to these questions force me to conclude that many concerns must be addressed prior to judicial AI’s wide-scale adoption.

The increasing reliance on algorithmic and AI systems by judges is reshaping the judiciary and its way of working in numerous ways. One aspect that has remain under- examined is how the judicial duty to state reasons may be affected. This refers to the obligation of judges to provide reasons whenever they rule in a case. In fact, the duty constitutes an essential component of the rule of law and the right to a fair trial, and fulfils important normative goals, such as legitimacy, transparency, and accountability of the judicial decision-making process. The chapter therefore first provides a concise conceptualisation of the duty, including its underlying normative goals. It then examines how and to what extent the judicial duty to state reasons can be impacted whenever judges rely on AI systems, focusing on the impact of such systems on the underlying normative goals of the duty. The chapter concludes with some reflections on how the duty can be safeguarded in the age of automation.

The chapter discusses how the Gulf republics, namely Iran and Iraq, have distinct political cultures shaped by historical factors. In contrast, the monarchies, often underestimated by rentier theory, have exhibited resilience and adaptability. The analysis encompasses the Gulf states’ political institutions, examining the role of constitutions, electoral chambers, and guarantees of political and civil liberties. It highlights the political diversity within the Gulf subregion, showcasing various political systems beyond simplistic labels of ‘republic’ or ‘monarchy’. Despite these apparent structures, the chapter underscores the limitations on political and civil activities, judicial independence and press freedom in the Gulf. The discussion delves into the nuanced nature of political activism, from platforms in Iraq and Iran to the emergence of political tendencies in Bahrain and Kuwait. The text further explores the use of force to suppress dissent in various Gulf states, leading to a lack of transparency and the absence of the rule of law. Finally, the chapter assesses the IDEA ratings, revealing the subregion’s generally low scores on the ‘democratic index’. Despite the challenges and limitations, the Gulf states remain dynamic entities with diverse political organisations, and in the absence of shocks or geopolitical disruptions, the author anticipates an evolutionary rather than revolutionary change in these countries’ political systems.

Legal futurists have urged judiciaries to experiment with automated legal systems. However, for many aspects of legal systems, there is a common sense that their translation into computation would be inappropriate. The simultaneous malleability of legal systems and prevalence of constitutive practices within them, should lead to a two-level consideration of (1) what aspects of a liberal legal order are crucial, and (2) for those that are crucial, what is lost when that aspect is either partially or fully automated. In legal decision-making, some patterns of action are merely instrumental to achieving ends, while others are essential, or constitutive: the activity should no longer even be considered part of a liberal legal order when the practice ceases. Administrative processes that are simply incidental and instrumental to the legitimate resolution of a case are well primed for automation. Other practices are essential and intrinsically important, and properly resist being converted into machine-readable code. Distinctions between incidental and constitutive, or instrumentally and intrinsically important, aspects of law, should both bound and guide legal automation.

Can AI adjudicative tools in principle better enable us to achieve the rule of law by replacing judges? This chapter argues that answers to this question have been excessively focused on ‘output’ dimensions of the rule of law – such as conformity of decisions with the applicable law – at the expense of vital ‘process’ considerations such as explainability, answerability, and reciprocity. These process considerations do not by themselves warrant the conclusion that AI adjudicative tools can never, in any context, properly replace human judges. But they help bring out the complexity of the issues – and the potential costs – that are involved in this domain.

The evolution of AI presents both challenges and opportunities for courts. To date, most discussion and examination of AI and courts has focused on decision-making tools, reflecting a broader trend in discourse around courts that unduly centres on courts’ adjudicatory functions. Yet courts perform a far wider set of functions and societal roles. This chapter examines the current and potential uses of AI, questions of suitability and ethics, and the challenges and opportunities that arise through this broader consideration of what it is courts actually do, beyond determining disputes. While AI may enhance access to justice, reduce costs, save time, and potentially improve the quality of justice, significant challenges arise, including the potential erosion of judicial respect, inaccuracy, and concerns for the separation of powers. Crucially, court users and the public ought to be more widely consulted in how AI is developed and deployed for courts to achieve better, fairer, and more effective justice.

Conceptual confusion remains a persistent challenge in political analysis. W. B. Gallie’s 1956 theory of “essentially contested concepts” remains a foundational attempt to address this issue by highlighting the normative dimensions of key political terms. This chapter revisits Gallie’s framework, applying it to the concepts of democracy and the rule of law. We explore both the strengths and the controversies surrounding his seven proposed criteria for contestedness. Critics have argued that several of Gallie’s criteria are overly narrow or ambiguous. In response, we contend that Gallie actually offers both restrictive and broader interpretations of these criteria, and we propose ways to reconcile his intentions with the critiques. Further criticisms claim Gallie encourages conceptual relativism or is too optimistic about resolving disagreement. We acknowledge these concerns but argue that his framework – especially when refined – offers a promising basis for fostering reasoned debate over contested terms. While political concepts often reflect deep normative divisions, this analysis shows how Gallie’s approach, enhanced by our proposed clarifications, can help structure more productive scholarly dialogue. The chapter concludes with a schematic summary of these refinements, presented in Table 10.1, to guide future work on conceptual disagreement and contested meaning in political science.

Britain’s constitutional evolution falls within the mainstream of European constitutional traditions, but the gulf between its governing practices and those adopted in the European mainstream has grown progressively wider. While most European nation-states have adopted written constitutions at critical moments of modern history, Britain continues to adhere to the traditional conception of a constitution as a set of laws, customs and practices that continuously evolve in response to social, economic and political change. This is one reason why Britain’s involvement in the venture of creating a European Union has always been rather awkward. In this chapter, I sketch the main constitutional tropes that have emerged in British thought and show how they express a constitutional identity antithetical to the assumptions driving the project of continuing European integration. I first introduce a series of constitutional stories through which the English have sought to explain themselves as a nation and a state and then consider how these accounts have evolved with the expansion of the English state into a British imperial state. Finally, I will indicate how these legacies ensured that Britain could never become an active participant in the European federal project.

The project of constitutional democracy and the rule of law concept served as a powerful unifying platform for political compromise during the liberal democratic transformation after 1989. Today’s challenge to the liberal rule of law calls for re-evaluating our understanding of that period. To provide a deeper historical perspective, this chapter offers a tentative historical typology of the various rule of law understandings of the period of ‘liberal consensus’. First, it outlines the historical roots of the 1989 democratic and constitutional revolutions in ECE, pointing out their major sources, namely the import of Western constitutional theory, dissident human rights activism and the mostly neglected yet critical authoritarian socialist constitutionalism. Second, the chapter analyses the politics of liberal constitutionalism, in the 1990s, from the point of view of its internal diversity, depending on the different political ideas and ideologies behind it. The variety of constitutional imagination sets the stage for the final step, which is the exploration of different rule of law conceptions, namely neoliberal, substantive, positivist and non-liberal. Although transnational in its perspective, the last section, for the sake of concision and clarity, focuses primarily on the Czech context.

Contrary to the widespread narrative, Polish constitutional law theory played a crucial role in the transition from authoritarian socialism to constitutional democracy. This chapter examines the evolution of Polish constitutional law within the political and legal context of the Polish People’s Republic (1944–1989). It argues that the discourse surrounding constitutional law evolved from being merely a façade to becoming a solid foundation for democracy, largely due to the development of a scholarly doctrine of constitutional review in the late 1960s. This doctrine allowed political elites, under both internal and external pressures, to initiate institutional changes, most notably the establishment of the Constitutional Tribunal. Poland became the only Warsaw Pact country with a constitutional court, and the Tribunal played a pivotal role in the country’s democratic transition. Consequently, the reforms of the 1980s can be seen as an institutionalization rather than a rejection of Polish constitutional law theory. Finally, this evolution helps in understanding the Central Eastern European constitutionalism, including the recent debate on the origins of the rule-of-law crisis.

The manageability of the technical obstacles set out in Chapter 4 established, this chapter turns to the adaptive challenges amalgamation faces – most notably its inconceivability to the judiciary. The chapter details the maladaptive constraints that underlie the constitutional drafters’ and legal establishment’s resistance to embracing vernacular law as part of South Africa’s ‘law of general application’ or ‘common law’, as well as the urgency of overcoming such resistance. Depicting the severe decline in institutional trust and rising support for undemocratic governance amidst the public’s waning hopes of material security, the chapter argues that, to strengthen South Africa’s rule of law, constitutionalism must be founded on the vernacular legal traditions that resonate with everyday South Africans, who often feel alienated by a legal system rooted in ‘uncommon’ law. Alter-Native Constitutionalism offers a sustainable path to transformation that would counteract public disillusionment with a constitutionalism that embraces rigid colonial precedents and simultaneously restore trust in the judiciary as the last line of defence. The chapter therefore argues for judicial praxis that re-envisions courts as mediators supporting collective agency, rather than mere adjudicators, thus fostering a relational approach aligning with Ubu-Ntu and honoring the country’s diverse normative traditions and social justice aspirations.

On my interpretation of Kelsen’s ‘pure’ theory of law, his basic norm must be understood as a regulative assumption, a claim about inquiry and what individuals must assume if their inquiry is into the authority of law. As such, this idea has both theoretical and practical dimensions. As a matter of theory, it requires an elaboration of authority as legitimate and attention to the way in which the relationship between those who wield authority and those subject to it can be said to be one of right rather than might. As a matter of practice, it requires attention to the way in which, in light of legal subjects’ experience of law, legal order is and should be designed with a view to vindicating its intrinsic commitment to the rule of law and its concomitant commitment to constitutionalism. However, all that cannot be had without acknowledging the drive towards substance in Kelsen’s theory, one that sacrifices its claim to be pure of ideology in the sense of political value commitments. But it preserves purity in an account in exclusively legal terms of how politics can take place in a space constructed by law, internationally as well as domestically.