Constitutional Violence: Legitimacy, Democracy and Human Rights

Antoni Abat i Ninet

Des. 2012 · Edinburgh University Press

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If constitutional legitimacy is based on violence, what does this mean for democracy? Almost every state in the world has a written constitution and, for the great majority, the constitution is the law that controls the organs of the state. But is a constitution the best device to rule a country? Western political systems tend to be 'constitutional democracies', dividing the system into a domain of politics, where the people rule, and a domain of law, set aside for a trained elite. Legal, political and constitutional practices demonstrate that constitutionalism and democracy seem to be irreconcilable. Antoni Abat i Ninet strives to resolve these apparently exclusive public and legal sovereignties, using their various avatars across the globe as case studies. He challenges the American constitutional experience that has dominated western constitutional thought as a quasi-religious doctrine. And he argues that human rights and democracy must strive to deactivate the 'invisible' but very real violence embedded in our seemingly sacrosanct constitutions.

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Antoni Abat i Ninet is Professor of Constitutional and Comparative Law at the ESADE Law School at the University Ramon Llull, Barcelona. He graduated in Law from the University of Girona in 2001 and was awarded a PhD by the University of Barcelona in 2007. From 2002 to 2005, he was granted the Juan de la Cierva competitive research scholarship by Spain's Ministry for Science and Innovation. He taught Comparative Constitutional Law and Ancient Constitutionalism at the State University of New York, the Lincoln Law School of San Jose and was Visiting Scholar at Stanford University Law School. His research interests include: the theoretical foundations of constitutions; the links between constitution, constitutionalism and democracy; global economic constitutionalism. Prof. Abat's articles and papers regularly appear in leading peer-reviewed journals in the U.S. and Europe (e.g. American Journal of Comparative Law, Ratio Juris, Philosophia quarterly of Israel).