The Art of Constitutional Drafting

Author: Autumn Wind
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2005-01-01
Features: The author possesses a unique intellectual background, centered around Hayek's thought, tracing back to the Austrian School of Economics, extending to the Scottish Enlightenment and the common law tradition, and dedicated to exploring the classical liberal ideas and institutional resources of China. The book attempts to integrate Eastern and Western thoughts and institutions, investigating a constitutionalist system with broad explanatory power. It collects essays written by the author in recent years on legal and constitutional studies. Part of the book proposes the concept of spontaneously discovering law, modeled on common law and Roman law during the Republican period, and thereby argues for a regime analysis framework based on the division of sovereign power and legal authority. It also raises the question of how legal procedures should be discovered for the Chinese people in the contemporary context. The second part, using the French Revolution and EU constitutionalism as precedents, points out that constitutionalism is a purely political endeavor, not a holistic social or cultural one. Therefore, attempting to establish free constitutionalism based on compelling the people to adhere to a specific religious belief will inevitably lead to the failure of constitutionalism. The third part attempts to reinterpret certain classical Chinese concepts and institutions using the basic conceptual framework of free constitutionalism. The three parts of the are full of original insights and hold significant reference value for the theoretical research of constitutional science in the Chinese context.