The Constitutional State (Oxford Constitutional Theory) - Softcover

Barber, N.W.

9780199659937: The Constitutional State (Oxford Constitutional Theory)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199659931 ISBN 13: 9780199659937

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2012

The Constitutional State provides an original analytical account of the state and its associated constitutional phenomena. It presents the state as a form of social group, consisting of people, territory and institutions bound together by rules. The institutions of the state make a distinctive and characteristic claim over the people of the state, who, in turn, have a distinctive and characteristic relationship with these institutions. This account reveals the importance of at least two forms of pluralism - legal and constitutional. It also casts light on some of the more difficult questions faced by writers on constitutions - such as the possibility of states undertaking actions and forming intentions, the moral significance of these actions for the people of the state, and the capacity of the state to carry responsibility for acts between generations.

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About the Author:

N. W. Barber is the Senior Law Fellow at Trinity College. He specializes in public law, in particular constitutional theory and has lectured on constitutional issues in America, Canada, Spain, and Germany.

Review:

[includes an] opening chapter that addresses methodology in constitutional theory - a free-standing essay that ought to be required reading for any serious student of constitutional theory. * Bradley Miller, Constitutional Commentary * The Constitutional State is unfailingly intelligent and provocative, and should be welcomed by students of constitutional theory, constitutional law, political science, and legal philosophy...The book's breadth and interdisciplinarity leads to many unexpected discoveries. * Bradley Miller, Constitutional Commentary * In his thought-provoking The Constitutional State, Nick Barber sets out to explain a social and political reality by attending to the reasons which call for its existence, and to show how some core defining features of that reality render it capable of responding to those reasons...it is a knowledgeable, wide-ranging and inspiring contribution, in particular thanks to a skillful and effective use of examples that help translate abstract points into real-life concerns without loss in argumentative power. * Maris Koepcke Tinture, The American Journal of Jurisprudence * What Barber does so successfully and so importantly and so refreshingly is to focus, first and foremost, on society, on the social, on sociality - on the human context in which and on which constitutionalism takes it grip It presents as a result a much more interesting interplay between is and ought in thinking of constitutionalism and the state. * Joseph Weiler, Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law *

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