This thesis examines the practice of parliamentary constitutional interpretation. Parliamentary constitutional interpretation is a form of reasoning used by parliamentarians to articulate the constitutional effect of a Bill, within the legislative process in Parliament. The significance of the practice is explored through a combination of empirical study and theoretical enquiry. The first part of the thesis describes and analyses parliamentary constitutional interpretation in three case studies, each on a different Government Bill from the 2010-2012 parliamentary session. Each study provides a fine-grained account of how parliamentarians interpreted the constitutional effect of each Bill and the role this interpretation played during the passage of the Bill. In order to identify the constitutional effect of a particular clause, parliamentarians interpret a range of constitutional norms including: constitutional principles, constitutional statutes and constitutional conventions. In each case study, parliamentary constitutional interpretation played an important role in shaping the constitutional effect of each Bill and holding the Government to account. The second part of the thesis uses the reality of the practice, as described in the case studies, to identify the value of parliamentary constitutional interpretation and to situate the practice within political constitutionalism. Two principal values of the practice are identified. Firstly, parliamentary constitutional interpretation can enhance the level of justification within the legislative process. Secondly, it can facilitate a distinctively parliamentary contribution to the normative content of the constitution. By expanding the role of legislative politics within the constitution, parliamentary constitutional interpretation can develop and strengthen the political model of constitutionalism. These values also serve as both a template for analysis of parliamentary performance and as a guide to parliamentary reform.

Emergente a partir do final do século XX, o constitucionalismo popular enquanto campo acadêmico, tem buscado desconstruir a narrativa que legitima a afirmação da supremacia do judicial review estadunidense. Segundo seus expoentes, o melhor desenho envolveria a interpretação política, e não legal, da Constituição. Selecionados os exemplos de Larry Kramer, Mark Tushnet e Jeremy Waldron, o trabalho buscará abordar seus argumentos desde um ponto de vista individual, mas também os elementos que lhes são comuns. Nesse sentido, além da ofensiva à revisão judicial, busca-se identificar os debates que se fazem presentes, e atravessam o campo, tais como a utilidade de um tribunal que traga estabilidade ao sistema político, a ideia de melhor intérprete, a questão contramajoritária e o ideal de autogoverno democrático, em uma sociedade contemporânea atravessada pelo desacordo. Considerados os argumentos, busco chamar a atenção para a parcialidade do pensamento dominante, cuja recepção se ampara sobre bases problemáticas. / Since the late twentieth century, popular constitutionalism has risen as an academic field that seeks deconstructing the narrative that justifies the affirmation of the supremacy of the American judicial review. According to its supporters, the best design for it would not involve the legal, but the political interpretation of the constitution. Selecting the examples of Larry Kramer, Mark Tushnet and Jeremy Waldron, this work aims at addressing their statements not only as individual points of view, but also considering the elements they have in common. In this sense, besides being an assault on judicial review, this texts focuses on identifying the debates that arise and crisscross the field, such as the usefulness of a court which brings stability to the political system, the idea of best constitutional decision-making, the countermajoritarian difficulty, and the ideal of democratic self-government in a contemporary society pervaded by disagreement. Taking such issues into consideration, I propose drawing attention to the bias of mainstream constitutional thinking, whose reception lies on problematic bases.

This thesis provides a reinterpretation of J.A.G. Griffith’s lecture ‘The Political Constitution’—a reinterpretation that stresses the commitment Griffith expressed in that lecture to the normative dimension of legal positivism. I call this normative dimension ‘normative positivism’. Identifying Griffith as a normative positivist serves to clarify a number of debates surrounding Griffith’s arguments in ‘The Political Constitution’ and serves to clarify our understanding of the concept that has come to be known in UK public law scholarship in recent years as ‘political constitutionalism’, of which Griffith is regarded as a leading exemplar. The thesis argues that Griffith’s political constitutionalism is best understood as a form of normative positivism and is very different from some more recent defences of political constitutionalism available in the scholarly literature. The thesis also considers how the big constitutional questions of the age in the UK—questions relating, for example, to bills of rights and devolution—play out in the light of our discovery and appreciation of Griffith’s normative positivism.

Emergente a partir do final do século XX, o constitucionalismo popular enquanto campo acadêmico, tem buscado desconstruir a narrativa que legitima a afirmação da supremacia do judicial review estadunidense. Segundo seus expoentes, o melhor desenho envolveria a interpretação política, e não legal, da Constituição. Selecionados os exemplos de Larry Kramer, Mark Tushnet e Jeremy Waldron, o trabalho buscará abordar seus argumentos desde um ponto de vista individual, mas também os elementos que lhes são comuns. Nesse sentido, além da ofensiva à revisão judicial, busca-se identificar os debates que se fazem presentes, e atravessam o campo, tais como a utilidade de um tribunal que traga estabilidade ao sistema político, a ideia de melhor intérprete, a questão contramajoritária e o ideal de autogoverno democrático, em uma sociedade contemporânea atravessada pelo desacordo. Considerados os argumentos, busco chamar a atenção para a parcialidade do pensamento dominante, cuja recepção se ampara sobre bases problemáticas. / Since the late twentieth century, popular constitutionalism has risen as an academic field that seeks deconstructing the narrative that justifies the affirmation of the supremacy of the American judicial review. According to its supporters, the best design for it would not involve the legal, but the political interpretation of the constitution. Selecting the examples of Larry Kramer, Mark Tushnet and Jeremy Waldron, this work aims at addressing their statements not only as individual points of view, but also considering the elements they have in common. In this sense, besides being an assault on judicial review, this texts focuses on identifying the debates that arise and crisscross the field, such as the usefulness of a court which brings stability to the political system, the idea of best constitutional decision-making, the countermajoritarian difficulty, and the ideal of democratic self-government in a contemporary society pervaded by disagreement. Taking such issues into consideration, I propose drawing attention to the bias of mainstream constitutional thinking, whose reception lies on problematic bases.

The last two decades have witnessed a period of constitutional change without precedent in the United Kingdom’s contemporary history, and prominent constitutionalists have suggested that these transformations signified primarily a legalisation of the British constitutional settlement. The present research hence offers a review of the most salient and impactful instances of constitutional change since 1997 with the aim of assessing in what ways the UK could be transitioning from a more political to a more legal constitutional framework. It highlights a greater reliance on legal devices to regulate constitutional processes and more frequent resort to judicial mechanisms of constitutional control. Indeed, the virtual entrenchment of various classes of norms (ECHR rights, common law constitutional rights and principles, Thoburn-‘constitutional statutes’) suggests the formation in British public law of a ‘bloc de constitutionnalité’ that could serve as basis for increasingly genuine forms of constitutional review. Concurrently, British courts are performing more of the functions of constitutional courts and appear willing to assume the role of constitutional guardian ascribed to the judiciary in a legal-constitutional model. Overall, the political constitution and its core principle of parliamentary sovereignty seem to be under challenge, particularly in judicial and jurisprudential debates grounded in the influential theory of common law constitutionalism. We therefore argue that the British constitution can no longer be described as exclusively ‘political’ and that there is at least some evidence of a trend towards legal constitutionalism in the UK.

[pt] Esta dissertação tem como escopo a interpretação da obra jurídico-política de Jürgen Habermas à luz dos problemas e desafios formulados por Carl Schmitt. A hipótese inicial, confirmada ao longo da exposição, versa sobre o caráter de modelo negativo que a obra weimariana de Schmitt adquiriu para Habermas. Trata-se de um trabalho que se propõe a ocupar a intercessão entre a teoria política e a filosofia do direito. O pensamento do político e das condições normativas da democracia articula-se com um determinado conceito de filosofia do direito - enquanto pensamento que não admite o esquecimento da questão da legitimidade do direito. Atua, ainda, num registro marcadamente contemporâneo. São as exigências, os problemas, as crises do mundo de hoje que norteiam as leituras de Schmitt, a compreensão da experiência de Weimar e dos elementos fundamentais da obra de Habermas nos anos 90. / [en] This research aims to interpret the legal-political work of Jürgen Habermas in light of the problems and challenges indicated by Carl Schmitt. Initial hypothesis, confirmed later, affirms that Schmitt s Weimar work has a negative model function in the Habermasian theoretical perspective. The present work places itself in the interdisciplinary field of philosophy of law and political theory. The thought of the political and the normative conditions of democracy interweave into a certain concept of philosophy of law - as a thought that does not allow itself to forget the issue of legal legitimacy. It works yet in the contemporary register. Requirements, problems and crises of the current world are those which guide the readings of Schmitt, the comprehension of the Weimar experience, and of the fundamental elements of the work of Habermas in the 90 s.