RevDem Top 5 Rule of Law Books of 2023 - by Oliver Garner

Hello, my name is Oliver Garner.

I'm the editor of the Rule of Law section of the C EU Democracy Institute's Live Platform, The Review of Democracy. These are my top five Rule of Law books of 2023.

My first choice is the abuse of constitutional identity in the European Union by Julian Scholtes, published by Oxford University Press.

This year, I had the pleasure of interviewing Julian about his work in autumn for RevDem. His book impressively categorizes the manners in which constitutional identity may be abused by a liberal actor into generative substantive and relational aspects. This work can provide a rejoinder to claims that constitutional identity is an unmitigated danger to liberal democracy. And instead, it may help us to preserve a concept that can usefully delimit the spheres of sovereign autonomy within our globalized world. My second choice is the book Against Constitutionalism by Martin Loughlin, published by Harvard University Press in 2022. The polemic title sets out the author's stall as an academic who is always willing to challenge the prevailing consensus within a field. Our fellow RevDem editor Kasia Krzyzanowska’ interview with Professor Loughlin this year teased out the heart of his argument as one that seeks to privilege the power of politics to change society over what he perceives to be the ideology of constitutionalism that may ossify progress through rarely legality. My third choice is the book European Disunion, Democracy, Sovereignty, and The Politics of Emergency by Stefan Auer, published by Hurst in 2022.

This monograph provides another challenge to one of the prevailing notions in liberal Western academia that the empty seat of power in supranational integration within Europe is a desirable feature of modernity.

Instead, such over bureaucratization may be a causative factor in the democratic irritations of populism and the liberalism. As Auer argues in this book, a full symposium on the monograph with contributions from Peter J. Verovšek, Gábor Halmai, and Petr Agha is available on RevDem.

My fourth choice is the book, The Jurisprudence of Constitutional Conflict in the European Union by Anna Bobek, published by Oxford University Press in 2022.

The legal face of the liberal challenge to supranational integration may be regarded as the constitutional conflicts between national apex courts and the Court of Justice of the European Union. Anna Bobek's book provides a rigorous academic treatise on these phenomena from the perspective of an insider within the court of justice.

Her development of categories of constructive and destructive constitutional conflict in the European Union may marry well with Scholtz's notions of abusive and genuine constitutional identity claims and both can be very useful tools in the future for such conflicts.

My final choice is the research handbook on the politics of constitutional law, edited by Mark Tushnet and the Lead researcher for the rule of law workgroup, Dmitry Kochenov. And this book was published by Edward Elgar in 2023.

This, will I believe be an authoritative tone on the interaction between core concepts such as democracy and the rule of law within constitutional systems.

The handbook is divided into contributions on foundations, structure rights and futures, which allows both a systematic look into the origins of constitutional politics and valuable reflections upon its development by a wide array of greatvoices within the field.

I hope that you have also enjoyed these books if you've also managed to read them this year and I hope you've also enjoyed the content we've put out on RevDem on the rule of law section and our book review section on themes covered in these works and similar.

I hope that you will join us again in 2024 when we continue to deliver podcasts and op-eds considering these arguments that are relevant for democracy in Europe.