Keywords
constitutionalism, citizen, state, democracy, counterconstitutionalism, bills of rights, civil law, common law
Abstract
Democratic constitutionalism has often erected a high barrierseparating the citizen from the state. This is paradoxical because the very promise of constitutionalism is to produce precisely the opposite result: to bind the citizen to the state, and to create and cultivate a constitutional culture that is anchored in participatory democracy. The author has a name for this paradoxical state of affairs: counterconstitutionalism. In this article, the author introduces and illustrates the conceptof counterconstitutionalism with reference to billsof rights in constitutional states representing civil and common law traditions on four continents.
Recommended Citation
Richard Albert, "Counterconstitutionalism" (2008) 31:1 Dal LJ 1.
