番茄社区

Prof Tarun Khaitan

This course is available on the LLM (extended part-time), LLM (full-time) and University of Pennsylvania Law School LLM Visiting Students. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit.

This course will study the practice of constitutionalisms in the Global South. ‘Constitutionalism’ will be understood in a thin sense, to include political precommitments to a wide variety of values (including democracy, liberalism, theocracy, and socialism) through a diverse range of constitutional actors (including courts, political parties, guarantor or ‘fourth branch’ bodies, the military, federal units, social movements, the political executive, and legislatures). 

One of the key objectives of the course is to decentre Euro-American practice in comparative constitutional discourse. To do so, it will examine the recent attempts to theorise Southern constitutionalisms—including, whether there is anything distinctively ‘Southern’ about the practice of constitutionalism in such a large and diverse part of the world. Illustrations of comparative constitutional practice will be drawn from a wide canvas of Southern jurisdictions— sometimes juxtaposed against a Northern example—with a focus on constitutional innovations that have been especially prominent in Southern jurisdictions. The particular experience of the Global South with colonialism and its implications for constitutionalism will also be studied.

20 hours of seminars in the AT. 2 hours of seminars in the ST.

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay in the AT.

On Theoretical Concepts

• Berihun Gebeye, A Theory of African Constitutionalism (OUP 2021) ch 1, ‘Legal Syncretism as a Theoretical Framework for African Constitutionalism’
• Ran Hirschl, ‘How Universal is Comparative Constitutional Law?’ in Comparative Matters: The Renaissance of Comparative Constitutional Law (Oxford University Press 2014) 192-223
• Philipp Dann, Michael Riegner & Maxim Bönnemann, ‘The Southern Turn in Comparative C