The question-what is a political constitution?-might seem, at first blush, fairly innocuous. At one level, the idea of a political constitution seems fairly well settled, at least insofar as most political constitutionalists subscribe to a similar set of commitments, arguments and assumptions....

‘Nothing is more certain in modern society', Chief Justice Vinson wrote in the First Amendment case of Dennis v United States (1951), ‘than the principle that there are no absolutes'. That conviction was affirmed and developed in Justice Frankfurter's concurring opinion, according to which...

In this paper, I review the depth of judicial and scholarly consensus respecting the principle of proportionality and offer an expository and critical account of proportionality analysis. I aim to introduce readers to different understandings of proportionality, showing how the judicial and...

There is no one perfect system of political financing. The design and development of public policies to regulate the sources of funding for candidates and political parties and their permissible expenditures are influenced by a myriad of mutually reinforcing and, at times, opposing...

This essay, written for From morality to law and back again: Liber amicorum for John Gardner (Michelle Dempsey and François Tanguay-Renaud, eds., Oxford University Press), is in conversation with the late John Gardner's essay "Can there be a written constitution?". It interrogates Gardner's...

This reply, written for a symposium in (2020) 11 Jurisprudence on Legislated Rights: Securing Human Rights Through Legislation (Cambridge University Press 2018, pb 2019), engages with the careful, constructive, and critical challenges of Timothy Endicott, Dimitris Tsarapatsanis, and Lael Weis....

This chapter defends a simple proposition: rights matter. It is a troubling reflection of the current state of juridical thought that it is in relation to human rights law that the proposition is defended. In an effort to reclaim rights from the position of inconsequence to which they have been...