Constitutional Dialogues
''Constitutional Dialogues' is a research program in the Department of Public Law, Jurisprudence and Legal History’. The full title of the research program is:
Constitutional Dialogues: In search of new ways of shaping public decision-making
About the research program:
Theme
The importance of non-hierarchical processes in shaping and controlling public power is increasingly being acknowledged, but up until now constitutional legal scholarship has not managed to get a grip on these processes that will allow us to assess their implications and significance.
This research program aims to contribute to our understanding of this development and find solutions for its more problematic implications by approaching constitutional issues from the angle of ‘dialogue’. The potential of ‘dialogue’ as a mode of public decision-making has been discussed in various scholarly areas that are concerned with legitimacy, accountability and quality of regulation, such as constitutional theory, regulation studies, judicial politics and comparative legal scholarship. A large part of the literature focuses on judicial dialogue or on dialogues between courts and legislatures. However, the current research program casts the net wider by including dialogues taking place between lawmakers and addressees and dialogues in and across a variety of decision-making fora (legislatures, courts, administrations, regulatory agencies, courts of auditors, committees, networks) often emerging in defiance of traditional constitutional branch divisions.
Questions
When classical methods fail, calls for ‘dialogue’ tend to follow rapidly. But what constitutes a ‘dialogue’? The way ‘dialogues’ as a processes for public decision-making take shape reveals a set of assumptions about what is legitimate in public decision-making. However, the frameworks for these dialogues are often implicit and even contradictory, hiding for instance behind a label of ‘best practice’. What are the risks and opportunities of employing a non-legal term in situations where the legal system is clearly in trouble? Do other – less deliberative – modes of decision-making hide behind the metaphor? Or would ‘networks’, ‘consultations’ and other processes related to public decision-making benefit from being cast more in terms of ‘dialogue’, possibly because this mode of communication comes with its own inherent ‘rules of the game’?
In order to answer such questions as the examples given above as well as the overarching research question ‘what role does dialogue play in shaping processes of public decision-making and lawmaking in particular?’ various individual and cooperative projects will explore the implications and significance of resorting to dialogue as a mode of public decision-making.
Objectives
The CD group has following research objectives:
- identifying the main roles that dialogues play or could play in constitutional law (scholarship);
- ‘mapping’ instances of dialogue affecting constitutional issues;
- assessing the normative implications of ‘resorting to dialogue’.
Dialogue in our research
In order to achieve a comprehensive picture of the role of dialogue in public decision-making the research program employs the concept of dialogue in three distinct ways:
- Dialogue as lens
- Dialogue as metaphor
- Dialogue as method
Focus areas
There are three focus areas within which the CD researchers – in overlapping constellations – operate:
- Methodology of dialogue
- Review as dialogue
- Judicial review
- Regulatory and other forms of non-judicial review
- Evolution of constitutional norms
Global / English