{"id":1689,"date":"2006-01-01T09:04:06","date_gmt":"2006-01-01T13:04:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/site\/?p=1689"},"modified":"2011-03-09T08:36:37","modified_gmt":"2011-03-09T12:36:37","slug":"issue_47-1_de-burca_gerstenberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/2006\/01\/issue_47-1_de-burca_gerstenberg\/","title":{"rendered":"The Denationalization of Constitutional Law"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Introduction<\/strong><\/span>*<\/p>\n<p>International  law, in general, and international human rights law, in particular,  have experienced a battering in recent years. Spurred in part by  national reactions to the \u201cnew terrorism,\u201d politicians and  legislators\u2014as well as judges, practitioners, and intellectuals  worldwide and along the ideological spectrum\u2014have expressed reservations  about the role and function of international law in domestic affairs.  Reactions have ranged from sharp skepticism about the authority and  utility of international law to conditions and caution about how it  should be given effect within the domestic system.<\/p>\n<p>Concerns  regarding the role of international law are evident throughout Europe.  In Germany, the federal constitutional court has in different ways  positioned itself as a bulwark between the national legal system and the  two European legal orders of which the court is a part\u2014the European  Union (\u201cEU\u201d) and the European Court of Human Rights (\u201cECHR\u201d) system. In  Denmark, the Council of Europe\u2019s Human Rights Commissioner\u2019s 2004  censure of Danish immigration policy on family reunification sparked  critical political and media debate on the relevance and authority of  international human rights law. And in the United Kingdom, which sought  to derogate from the relevant provisions of the European Convention on  Human Rights, the Home Secretary responded sharply to the United Nations  Special Rapporteur on Torture\u2019s criticisms by castigating the United  Nations and its alleged focus on the \u201chuman rights of terrorists.\u201d On  the other side of the Atlantic, the debate about the relevance of  \u201cforeign law\u201d to constitutional adjudication has been equally vigorous. A  number of liberal academic scholars have joined conservative  intellectuals in declaring international law fundamentally  anti-democratic.<\/p>\n<p>Using the European experience as a basis for  analysis, this Article challenges the prevailing skepticism by arguing  for an understanding of international human rights law and international  adjudication as a practice of \u201cjustification.\u201d Under this view,  international law obligates states merely to justify those local  practices that deviate from a shared, publicly evolving, crosscommunity  set of standards. This obligation may be triggered in part by individual  claims. The theory conceives of the relationship between national  constitutional law and international adjudication, moreover, outside the  context of a strict monism-dualism dichotomy. According to that  dichotomy, international law is either an authoritative external body of  law which directly penetrates the national legal order, or a corpus of  foreign law which must be filtered first through the prism of national  constitutional law. This Article argues instead that international  adjudication should be conceived of as having a persuasive function and  not an overriding one. International and constitutional norms should be  understood as contextually competing rule-of-law values rather than as  conflicting legal sources vying against one another.<\/p>\n<p>Part I sets  forth the theoretical framework of the argument for a \u201cjustification  view.\u201d Part II applies this framework to EU law, examining the  relationship that has developed between both European Court of Justice  (\u201cECJ\u201d) and European Human Rights Convention (\u201cEHRC\u201d) case law on the  one hand and national law on the other.<strong><br \/>\n<\/strong><em><\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>* This excerpt does not include  citations. To read the entire article, including supporting notes,  please download the PDF.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>International law, in general, and international human rights law, in particular, have experienced a battering in recent years. Spurred in part by national reactions to the \u201cnew terrorism,\u201d politicians and legislators\u2014as well as judges, practitioners, and intellectuals worldwide and along the ideological spectrum\u2014have expressed reservations about the role and function of international law in domestic affairs. Reactions have ranged from sharp skepticism about the authority and utility of international law to conditions and caution about how it should be given effect within the domestic system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[123],"tags":[110,43],"class_list":["post-1689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-print-archives","tag-con-law","tag-aid-and-development"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peZu3S-rf","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.law.harvard.edu\/ilj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}