Author Description

The chief concern of this book is to discuss a <i>democratic legitimation</i> for modern law. Investigation is therefore steered towards current debates on processes of Europeanisation and the issue of <i>self-constitutionalisation</i> of a democratic polity. This turns out to be a complex concept referring to the threefold constitutionalisation: legal, institutional and horizontal, and hence to processes of evolutionary constitution making as well as institutional and societal constitutionalisation. Developing democratic legitimation in post-conventional terms rests on the presumption of increasing the processes of incrementally rationalising lifeworlds and unveils the role of the <i>practical power of judgement</i> transferred from the concept of a (monological) subject to the (dialogical-discursive) public spheres.