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- Title
Constitutional Law in "old" and "new" Law and Development.
- Authors
Bryde, Brun-Otto
- Abstract
The internationalization of constitutional law is a very exciting development; however, it should be discussed in the light of the law and development movements critique of the wisdom of legal transfers. The expectations of modernization theory with respect to the transfer of constitutionalism through colonial imposition proved wrong for the same reasons, which were developed in the self-critique of the law and development movement: they were naïve and they were ethnocentric. In light of these experiences, the current developments raise two questions: Firstly, whether the international diffusion of constitutionalism in the last decades will be more successful and secondly, whether socio-legal scholarship will confront the subject more maturely this time. While we again can detect attempts of one-sided insistence on foreign models and reliance on the untested reception of such models, there are differences to the "old" situation, which allow a more optimistic evaluation of the globalization of constitutional law today. The process is much more independent and self-sustaining, which implies that comparisons with colonial imposition would be inappropriate. In addition, the process is much more internationalized. Constitutional law has become an international subject with a worldwide infrastructure of scholars, academic societies, and journals. While "old" law and development theory should teach us to be aware of power relationships and the sociological problems of legal transfers, it would be uncritical to confer those old critiques wholesale and to overlook the much more participatory and egalitarian aspects of the new constitutionalism, especially owed to the development of international human rights law.
- Subjects
CONSTITUTIONAL law; LAW &; economic development; MODERNIZATION (Social science); CONSTITUTIONALISM; GLOBALIZATION
- Publication
Law & Politics in Africa, Asia & Latin America / Verfassung und Recht in Übersee (VRÜ), 2008, Vol 41, Issue 1, p10
- ISSN
0506-7286
- Publication type
Article