Constitutional Violence

If constitutional legitimacy is based on violence, what does this mean for democracy?
Almost every state in the world has a written constitution. The great majority of these declare the constitution to be the law controlling the organs of the state. We tend to label western liberal political systems as 'constitutional democracies', dividing the system into a domain of politics where the people rule and a domain of law that is set aside for a trained elite. Legal, political, and constitutional practices demonstrate that constitutionalism and democracy seem to be irreconcilable. Is good government feasible and is a constitutional system the best device to rule a country? Can the public and legal sovereignties be reconciled?
Antoni Abat i Ninet strives to resolve these apparently exclusive realms of power, using as case study their various avatars across the globe. The American constitutional experience that has dominated western constitutional thought is here challenged as quasi-religious doctrine and the author argues that human rights and democracy must strive to deactivate the 'invisible' but very real violence embedded in our seemingly sacrosanct constitutions.
Antoni Abat i Ninet is Professor of Law at the University of Copenhagen.

Antoni Abat i Ninet is Professor of Law at the University of Copenhagen. He graduated in Law from the University of Girona in 2001 and was awarded a PhD by the University of Barcelona in 2007. Before joining the University of Copenhagen, he was granted the Juan de la Cierva competitive research scholarship by Spain's Ministry for Science and Innovation. From 2002 to 2005, he taught Comparative Constitutional Law and Ancient Constitutionalism at the State University of New York, the Lincoln Law School of San José 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. Professor 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).