Book Launch: Constitutionalism and Its Discontents

his event was organised by the UCL Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism. Speakers: Prof Mark Tushnet (William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law emeritus, Harvard Law School) and Prof Bojan Bugaric (Professor of Law, University of Sheffield) Commentators: Prof Mathilde Cohen (Professor of Law, CNRS – Centre National De La Recherche Scientifique), Prof Theunis Roux (Professor of Law, School of Global and Public Law, UNSW Sydney) Chair: Prof Erin Delaney (UCL Laws) Abstract This event celebrates the launch of Constitutionalism and Its Discontents (University of Chicago Press (2026), co‑authored by Mark Tushnet and Bojan Bugaric About the Book Since the turn of the century new political forces have come on the scene: autocrats, reactionary populists, radical progressives. Each group has expectations about what constitutionalism is, what it can be, and what it should be, and each deprecates versions of constitutionalism inconsistent with their own visions. Liberals hope to use constitutionalism to prevent any further rise of autocrats (“how to prevent Trump’s comeback” or “how to stop Orbán”—both failed projects); reactionary/authoritarian populists use constitutionalism to entrench their undemocratic practices; progressives identify multiple “crises of constitutional democracy” and worry that constitutionalism displaces the ability of well-intentioned majorities to govern themselves, in part by empowering constitutional courts that by necessary design are vulnerable to political capture. Yet many such progressives hope to remedy these crises through constitutionalism. Liberals, including some progressives, acknowledge that seemingly robust constitutional systems have proven vulnerable to—and may even have facilitated the rise of—autocrats. This requires that their enthusiasm for constitutionalism as such be transformed into enthusiasm for specific (and arguably partisan) forms of constitutionalism. That, however, runs up against one of the hopes held out by constitutionalism’s proponents, that it provides a neutral framework for the resolution of partisan conflicts. In this book we take up several of these challenges: concerns about constitutionalism itself as unduly limiting popular choice; concerns about modern forms of constitutionalism that commit nations to specific programs in economics and the environment; and concerns about the ability of constitutionalism to resist the forces that would undermine it. Our overall argument is that each of these concerns is serious, that addressing each through constitutional design and innovation (some of which we describe) is potentially valuable, and that each potentially valuable action has an underside that threatens to reproduce the conditions that give rise to the concerns in the first place. The argument of the book as a whole is that constitutionalism is beset by the paradox that it aims to both empower democratic self-governance and limit the exercises of that power. The paradox is deepened with the observation—developed throughout the book—that the steps constitutionalists take to reduce one form of their discontent often exacerbate another discontent. We do not propose a way of dissolving the difficulties created by the fundamental paradox. We do suggest that scaling back our expectations about what we can get from constitutionalism will reduce our discontent.