This chapter contains answers to the Questionnaire on Constitutional Democracy for Chinese Liberal Intellectuals, which covers the basic concepts and institutional designs of constitutional democracy. China’s most pressing task is not making a new and better constitution, but rather formulating social contract through implementing the existing constitution, which does pay lip service to many political natural law precepts. Unlike many admirers of the American presidential system, I advocate for a Westminster-type parliamentary system, which has largely been borrowed by the current Chinese constitution, to be embedded in a federal framework for future China.

A hundred years after the Xinhai Revolution, a centennial judgment has to be made by an impartial observer for the interest of China’s constitutional cause. Despite its sharp language, the main theme of the Manifesto is to explore the conditions and mechanisms of constitutional transformation, as well as the way out of the hopeless historical cycle of reform and revolution. It analyzes the cultural syndrome under absolute despotism and the difficulties it has caused to constitutional transformation, and presents the human dignity theory of modernized Confucianism as a possible solution to transform the Chinese moral and political personality.

How has discrimination changed over time? What does discrimination look like today? This chapter begins by highlighting severe and systematic acts of discrimination throughout American history. It then assesses contemporary discrimination through a range of audit studies and other methods and then delves into individual perceptions of discrimination.

Chapter 3 provides a review of democratic theory, moving from the “minimal conception” of democratic politics to democracy in its representative, constitutional, participatory, deliberative, and epistemic forms. The chapter offers a comparison of where America stands today among the world’s democracies and introduces the question of whether democracy carries the assumption of equality; it also reviews data on inequality throughout American history and on the more recent increase in inequality. We propose the idea that inequality is not extraneous to our democratic politics, but a direct result of it.

In recent years, Confucian philosophers have vigorously explored the ideal of human dignity by reinterpreting key classical Confucian texts, giving rise to two contending accounts of human dignity: egalitarian dignity versus meritocratic dignity. Meritocratic dignity understands human dignity as an achievement, the outcome of a long process of moral self-cultivation, while egalitarian dignity, inspired by Mencius who believes that human nature is good, disagrees with the strong virtue-ethical account of human dignity and shift attention to universal moral potentiality. After showing that each Confucian account underpins a distinctive political system – Confucian constitutional democracy and Confucian political meritocracy, respectively – this chapter attempts to reinforce the egalitarian account of Confucian dignity from the standpoint of Xunzian Confucianism predicated on the assumption that human nature is bad. The chapter argues that, whereas meritocratc dignity is limited in justifying the independent judiciary and protecting citizens’ rights, egalitarian dignity can coherently undergird the principle of the separation of power and the right to political participation.

Chapter 1 evaluates competing EU and member state claims over the constitutional boundaries of ‘constitutional identity’ and Kompetenz-Kompetenz in the European legal order, and identifies two constitutional boundaries of the EU legal order which will impinge on the selection of fiscal federalism models for the EU. The first is fiscal sovereignty. Member state fiscal sovereignty is a permanent constitutional constraint on the application of fiscal federalism theory in the EU. The Union can have no powers other than what the member states have given it, and nemo plus iuris, what the member states have given it is limited by their own ‘constitutional identities’ – of which fiscal sovereignty lies at the core. The second is comprised of the fundamental guiding principles of price stability and ‘fiscal discipline’ (sound public finances, and sustainable balance of payments) binding on the mandate for EMU itself under Article 119(3) TFEU.

Almost all economists, left and right, love markets. Studies show that markets are more efficient than government because, in the private sector, managers and owners reap the rewards when they efficiently respond to consumer demand. The power of markets increases when, as in the modern world, the uses of resources have multiplied beyond measure.

Dedicated policy professionals are focused on improving their programs. Economists are more likely to also focus on opportunity cost, the damage to other programs when too many resources go to any single one. They are aware that “setting priorities” should not mean our top priority gets all the resources. In some absolute sense, safety is more important than recreation. But we should not abolish all youth baseball leagues, because a child is very rarely struck in the head by the ball.

Despite their frequent usefulness, economists place unbalanced emphasis on narrow self-interest as both compelling motive and route to happiness. Competing disciplines can lead to a deeper perspective. Positive psychology reminds us that friends and family lead to more happiness than wealth. That discipline focuses on admiration and elevation, as does the discipline of virtue ethics. These very different disciplines also agree on the importance of gratitude; it is both a virtue and a feature of the road to happiness. We should be grateful for our economy, which has led us to income per capita that is 25 times what it was in 1820. Liberty sparks our economic dynamism and is also at the heart of our constitutional democracy. In difficult times in particular, we should be grateful for our freedom.

Moreso writes about a theory of law related to legal positivism that has been highly influential in the Latin world, namely, Luigi Ferrajoli’s garantismo, or theory of constitutional guarantees or warrants. He explains that the word ‘garantismo’ suggests a conception of law as a system of constitutional guarantees of human rights, and distinguishes two main ideas in Ferrajoli’s account: the separation thesis and the distinction between valid law and law in force. For Ferrajoli, the very idea of constitutional rights gives rise to a distinction between validity and social efficacy, because even though the legislature might enact a statute that violates a constitutional right, the statute might become socially effective, and this means that there might be legally invalid norms that are nevertheless in force. Moreso also introduces Ferrajoli’s distinction between a constitutionalism of guarantees and a constitutionalism of rights, which he criticises, arguing, in particular, that accepting the rule/principles distinction does not have to lead to lack of legal certainty. Finally, he points out that Ferrajoli is an inclusive legal positivist.

Guastini argues that legal positivism was first conceived as a type of legal philosophy by Norberto Bobbio in 1950, and that Bobbio later distinguished between methodological positivism, theoretical positivism and ideological positivism. For Bobbio, methodological positivism is a (normative) view about legal scholarship, namely, that it should be descriptive; that theoretical positivism is a substantive theory of law, according to which law is a set of commands issued by the sovereign, legal interpretation is a cognitive enterprise, and the application of law is a matter of deduction; that ideological positivism is the view that one ought to obey the law regardless of its content; and that all three types of legal positivism share the view that there is no such thing as natural law. As Guastini explains, contemporary Italian legal philosophers reject theoretical positivism and mostly conceive of legal positivism along methodological lines, holding that there is no natural law, that it is important to distinguish between expository and censorial jurisprudence (in Bentham’s terminology), and that there is no obligation to obey the law all things considered or regardless of the law.