What is the significance of the School Strike for Climate from an international constitutional perspective? In this article, I compare the School Strike for Climate with the Hong Kong protests of 2019–20. Both these movements became necessary because of gaps in their countries’ respective domestic and international legal frameworks – what I term constitutionalism gaps. The immediate cause of each protest was how state and non-state actors exploited these constitutionalism gaps in the existing legal framework. Protests in Hong Kong were triggered by the attempt to enact an Extradition Law that threatened people’s autonomy, whereas the School Strike for Climate is a response to the failure of the state to deliver climate justice. Both these movements use similar strategies of advocacy and they have relied extensively on new technology. Based on this comparison, I argue that the School Strike for Climate promotes procedural and substantive values of constitutionalism at the international level, similar to the Hong Kong Protests at the domestic level. Through the School Strike for Climate, people seek to engage directly in the transnational legal process. In attempting to bridge the constitutionalism gap at the international level, the School Strike for Climate promotes values of global constitutionalism.

This article revisits the legitimacy question as it touches the Nigerian 1999 Constitution, bringing to the discourse a review and application of pertinent theoretical perspectives on constitution making and constitutional legitimacy. This theoretical and pragmatic approach introduces a refreshing angle to the debate, revealing the paucity of any attempt to ascribe any legitimacy claim to a constitution with a doubtful normative claim and fraudulent attribution of its source and legitimacy to the people. The author finds the consent basis of constitutional legitimacy as most attractive to a divided state like Nigeria, and concludes by advocating the adoption of a blend of the principles of the constituent assembly and post sovereign constitution-making models for the production of a new people-driven and inclusive constitution to meet the needs of the Nigerian people.

This article discusses the contribution of European political parties to democratic backsliding. It focuses on the European People’s Party’s efforts to protect the Hungarian government, and the European Conservatives and Reformists party’s permissive acceptance of the Polish government’s attacks on democracy and the rule of law, analysing these patterns of behaviour as a form of complicity in democratic backsliding. In a second step, the article examines the existing possibilities and normative justification for sanctioning European political parties that make a complicit contribution to democratic backsliding.

Before neoliberalism became global, it was an intellectual project that had a particular view of the power of constitutions to limit sovereign states, anchor economic freedoms and protect markets from democratic pressures for greater equality. In Latin America and the developing world, neoliberalism has long been identified with the political economy of the Washington Consensus. However, the comprehensive study of its legal foundations and institutional arrangements is still an area of limited scholarly attention. This article attempts to advance in that direction. By examining the work of Friedrich A. Hayek, Milton Friedman and James M. Buchanan, it explores a theory of neoliberal constitutionalism within Chile, the so-called first neoliberal laboratory. These authors visited the country during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–90), and were connected with top Chilean authorities as part of their global ambitions to implement their theoretical agendas in real-world scenarios. The article argues that Chile’s constitution-making process between 1973 and 1980 offered an on-site experiment in introducing neoliberal’s radical economic transformation. It addresses how the dictatorship’s natural law-based rule of law principles were compatible with the neoliberal constitutional ideology by supporting a distinctive view of the state’s role and designing the innovative institutional arrangements necessary to guarantee the market’s priority in the structural and rights dimension of the 1980 Constitution. In the wake of Chile’s recent constitutional change agenda, this article not only contributes to the existing debate by reflecting on the ideological origins of the still-persistent constitutional neoliberal features, but also works as a case study for evaluating new global turns towards authoritarian neoliberal politics.

Ius Constitutionale Commune in Latin America (ICCAL) is an academic endeavour that attempts to provide an account of the original Latin American path of transformative constitutionalism, comprising elements from national, transnational and international legal orders, and where the law is placed at the service of the normative trinity of constitutionalism, namely the rule of law, democracy and human rights. In this regard, ICCAL speaks of an Inter-American law that represents a new legal phenomenon, in a region where constitutionalist ideas have allegedly claimed new traction. In this article, I develop two main critiques that can be deemed challenges for an academic project that is still ‘under construction’, and provide an intellectual map of Latin American constitutionalism that could address these critiques and serve as a roadmap for studying potential Latin American contributions to debates around global constitutionalism.

A state should be deemed to be enjoying fiscal sovereignty where it is effectively empowered, without pressure or coercion, to make all policy decisions required to run the state machinery and satisfy the fundamental needs of its people (at the very least), both individual and collective. A state’s effective policy and decision-making power is effectively curtailed where: (1) it has been substituted in these functions by a third state or an organ of that state; (2) it is prevented from taking a particular action, such as unilateral default; (3) it is forced to violate fundamental domestic laws, including its constitution or the result of a referendum; or (4) external pressure is exerted against its government and institutions, with the aim of creating volatility and uncertainty concerning its finances so it succumbs to such pressure.