Book Review, Luis I. Gordillo, Interlocking Constitutions: Towards an Interordinal Theory of National, European and UN Law
Guilherme Vasconcelos Vilaça
Eric Castren Institute of International Law and Human Rights
2013
Law and Politics Book Review, Vol. 27, No. 3, pp. 349-354, 2013
Abstract:
Interlocking Constitutions is a recent addition to the already voluminous scholarship on the fragmentation of international law. The book advances two claims: one descriptive and one normative.
Interlocking Constitutions is a ponderous book that documents exhaustively, from a doctrinal and case law standpoint, the degree of fragmentation in the relations between the European legal order(s) and the international one represented by the United Nations. At the same time, this description is not particularly new and will only be of interest for those readers wishing to have a comprehensive picture, particularly with regard to the historical details, of such legal fragmentation.
Unfortunately, the articulation of the book’s normative thesis, i.e. soft constitutionalism as the most adequate model to address interordinal constitutionalism, is rather unconvincing. This is because the author neither elaborates on the normative aspects of the theory of interordinal constitutionalism nor engages properly in normative reasoning. Since the descriptive claim, albeit solid, is fairly standard, the shortcomings of the normative argument effectively limit the contribution the book makes to existing scholarship on the fragmentation of international law.
Interlocking Constitutions is a ponderous book that documents exhaustively, from a doctrinal and case law standpoint, the degree of fragmentation in the relations between the European legal order(s) and the international one represented by the United Nations. At the same time, this description is not particularly new and will only be of interest for those readers wishing to have a comprehensive picture, particularly with regard to the historical details, of such legal fragmentation.
Unfortunately, the articulation of the book’s normative thesis, i.e. soft constitutionalism as the most adequate model to address interordinal constitutionalism, is rather unconvincing. This is because the author neither elaborates on the normative aspects of the theory of interordinal constitutionalism nor engages properly in normative reasoning. Since the descriptive claim, albeit solid, is fairly standard, the shortcomings of the normative argument effectively limit the contribution the book makes to existing scholarship on the fragmentation of international law.
Number of Pages in PDF File: 5
Keywords: Transnational legal orders, Soft constitutionalism, EU law, United Nations
Full text available at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2340455
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