Talking About International Constitutional Law

The project was a theoretical one. Three debates dominate contemporary discussion of international law’s relationship to constitutional law:

• whether and how international law is ‘constitutionalizing’ (whether the ‘inside’ of domestic constitutional law is ‘coming out’)
• whether and how domestic constitutional law is internationalizing (how the ‘outside’ of foreign judgments and international human rights law, is ‘coming in’), and
• whether international law now specifies how domestic constitutions are to be drafted and what they are to comprise (shows collapse of the language of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’).

This project aimed to provide an intellectual map of these areas , the controversies within each debate, and the ‘conversation’ between each debate, with a view to exploring whether they were in fact all ‘one’ debate, or ‘many’ different debates. The deeper purpose was to contribute to our understanding of constitutionalism and constitution-making.