Author Meets Critics on "Constitutionalizing the Private Sphere": Reassessing the Public-Private Divide

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

Do private actors have constitutional duties? While traditionally only government actors are responsible for upholding constitutional rights, courts and constitution-makers increasingly do assign constitutional duties to private actors as well. In applying rights "horizontally" in this way, a landlord may have constitutional duties to their tenants, for example, or a sports club may have duties to its fans.

This panel engages Christina Bambrick’s book, forthcoming with Cambridge, “Constitutionalizing the Private Sphere.” The book argues that the horizontal application of rights can be understood through the lens of republican political theory. Themes echoing such concepts as the common good and civic duty from republican thought recur in discourses surrounding horizontal application. Bambrick traces such themes in constitutional debates from the United States, India, Germany, South Africa, and the European Union. This is the first book-length effort to understand the constitutional practice of horizontal application in terms of political theory, and only the second comparative monograph in political science on the subject.

In the same way that the book brings together different subfields of political science fruitfully, this panel assembles a diverse group of scholars who, in different ways, all study the relationship between public and private spaces. Panellists include specialists in law, political theory, and even international relations, working on projects ranging from rights and duties in digital spaces, to the seemingly unbounded power of many private corporations. Taking a cue from the featured book’s effort to illuminate the theoretical potential and moral choices involved in horizontal application, this roundtable will critically examine how we think (and how we should think) about the public-private divide today.

Sub Unit

• Division 26: Law and Courts

Chair

• Abigail R. Moncrieff Cleveland State University

Presenters

• Christina Bambrick University of Notre Dame

• Swati Srivastava Purdue University

• Gaurav Mukherjee NYU Law

• Ioanna Tourkochoriti University of Baltimore

• Felix Petersen University of Münster