ADRO 23A10 - Contemporary Constitutional Law

The course aims at providing participants with the critical tools necessary to interrogate and deconstruct the evolution of contemporary constitutionalism on a global scale, through a postmodern comparative legal method. Rather than treating constitutional categories as fixed or universal, students will be invited to question the foundational assumptions underlying more traditional concepts while engaging with emerging, contested legal notions such as legal transplants and constitutional degeneration or retrogression. The postmodern perspective adopted in this course challenges the idea of a single, linear trajectory of constitutional development, foregrounding instead plurality, contingency, and the politics of knowledge embedded in legal comparison itself.

Students will learn to handle these concepts as historically situated constructs shaped by power relations, cultural hierarchies, and geopolitical contexts. Particular attention will be paid to voices and constitutional experiences that have been traditionally marginalized or peripheral within mainstream comparative constitutional scholarship, including postcolonial, non-Western, and hybrid constitutional orders.

The course will open with an introductory session and a methodologically oriented session devoted to the postmodern critique of comparative methods. Subsequent weeks will explore the main theoretical concepts of the subject (legal families, constitutions and constitutionalism, Forms of State, Forms of Government, Type of State, Constitutional Retrogression, multilevel constitutions, etc.) through a critical and reflexive lens. In the following weeks, case studies deemed particularly significant, and deliberately chosen for their diversity and capacity to unsettle received constitutional paradigms, will be examined in depth.

• Students are expected to be familiar with the basic concepts of Public Law.
• Students will have to actively participate in the lessons (especially in the discussion groups), presenting case studies and taking part in the simulations and conversations.

The final grade is divided as follows: the final exam (written exam, 4hrs) constitutes 1/3 of the final grade; the conference grade (continuous assessment + midterm) counts for 2/3 of the final grade.