Date: 2022
Type: Article
Book review : the law as a conversation among equals
Jurisprudence, 2022, Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 708-718
FEISEL, Franca Maria, Book review : the law as a conversation among equals, Jurisprudence, 2022, Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 708-718
- https://hdl.handle.net/1814/75257
Retrieved from Cadmus, EUI Research Repository
The phenomenon of democratic erosion has become a prominent topic in constitutional scholarship over the past years. It is this concern with a deep-seated crisis of democracy that also motivates Roberto Gargarella’s The Law as a Conversation Among Equals. However, Gargarella approaches the questions of what this crisis is rooted in and how it can be remedied in a different way than more traditional constitutionalist approaches.1 The book’s core argument is that a lot of problems which Western constitutional democracies currently suffer from can be attributed to the flawed and at its core anti-democratic design of our institutions. Gargarella traces these ‘design errors’ back to the founding fathers of (American) constitutionalism and the influence their ideas subsequently had around the Western world. According to him, a bias towards elitist minority rule and against democratic self-government has ever since been an in-built feature of legislative, executive and judicial institutions, of the relationship between those institutions and that with the broader body politic. Therefore, Gargarella forcefully argues against the, in his view, widespread conviction that the present deterioration of constitutional democracy can be countered through internal means, for instance by restoring or improving constitutional checks and balances. In fact, the anti-democratic logic at the core of our current political institutions rather makes them a part of the democratic problem – one which can only be remedied with more and more genuine democracy. For Gargarella, this means a radical reforming of our present-day political system and institutions following the regulatory ideal of a ‘conversation among equals’.
Additional information:
Published online: 24 October 2022; Book review of 'The law as a conversation among equals by Roberto Gargarella, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2022, ISBN: 9781009098595'
Cadmus permanent link: https://hdl.handle.net/1814/75257
Full-text via DOI: 10.1080/20403313.2022.2133272
ISSN: 2040-3321; 2040-3313
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
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