Lorenzo Zucca

A genealogical account of state sovereignty explores the ways in which the concept has emerged, evolved, and is in decline today. Sovereignty has a theological foundation, and is deeply bound up with the idea of God, in particular a voluntarist God, presented as being capable of intervening directly in the world. Religious conflicts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries forced the separation between religion and politics, and opened the space for the emergence of a national state endowed with sovereignty which has dominated the world until now. Today’s rise of international and transnational obligations challenges the conventional understanding of state sovereignty, which cannot account for the normative density of the global order and the corresponding decline of state-based political authority. In order to explain that, I contrast two competing understandings of state sovereignty: a static one and a dynamic one. The static understanding regards sovereignty as absolute within the state territory. The dynamic understanding regards sovereignty as evolutionary: according to this account, the state is just one possible form that sovereignty can take. I conclude by suggesting that the dynamic understanding of state sovereignty is better suited to explaining the decline of state sovereignty.

Constitutional Goods offers an ambitious constitutional theory that challenges basic liberal ideas such as the priority of basic liberties and the inevitable disagreement between competing conceptions of the right and the good. The book has two objectives: it attempts to widen, on the one hand, the list of constitutional goods that deserve priority over other interests. On the other, it tries to bring competing conceptions of the right and the good together under an overarching umbrella defined as the 'inclusive conception’. This article attempts to show that, despite the valuable and ambitious effort,Constitutional Goods&is unlikely to convince everyone of its capacity for inclusiveness

This book deals with one of the most important issues of philosophy of law and constitutional thought: how to understand clashes of fundamental rights, such as the conflict between free speech and privacy. The main argument of this book is that much can be learned about the nature of fundamental legal rights by examining them through the lens of conflicts among such rights, and criticizing the views of scholars and jurists who have discussed both fundamental legal rights and the nature of conflicts among them. Theories of rights are necessarily abstract, aiming at providing the best possible answers to pressing social problems. Yet such theories must also respond to the real and changing dilemmas of the day.Taking up the problem of conflicting rights, Zucca seeks a theory of rights that can guide us to a richer, more responsive approach to rights discourse. The idea of constitutional rights is one of the most powerful tools to advance justice in the Western tradition. But as this book demonstrates, even the most ambitious theory of rights cannot satisfactorily address questions of conflicting rights. How, for instance, can we fully secure privacy when it clashes with free speech? To what extent can our societies assist people in dying without compromising the protection of life? Exploring the limitations of the rights discourse in these areas, Zucca questions the role of law in settling ethical dilemmas helping to clarify thinking about the limitations of rights discourse.

This paper is about the place of religion in Alan Brudner’s Constitutional Goods. More generally, it offers some thoughts on the place of religion in constitutional theory and political philosophy today. This theologico-political question was central for many centuries, but gradually faded as our secular age affirmed itself. Recent political and social events at the European and at the global level have firmly turned the tide.Constitutional Goods as a modern natural law theory of liberal constitutionalism has a lot to say about religion, but crucially it does not say enough. In particular, it clearly shows how constitutional theory has shaped itself in relation to--if most of the time in opposition to--religion, but does not explain why political philosophy is mainly about the theologico-political question. Nor does it attempt to explain how that issue may characterize our future constitutional debates. However, it fails to directly address the question of the relation between religion and public reason. Does the inclusive conception provide a strictly secular conception of public reason or does it also include religious views? My impression is that the inclusive conception only brings together philosophical conceptions. By only doing so, it fails to engage with the more pressing social and political problems that we may face. And incidentally, it rides roughshod on the most important question of political philosophy. Under what conditions can public reason accommodate religious views? It is surprising that Constitutional Goods does not offer any substantive developments on these points. Modern secular states will face very difficult choices. We do not want to give up hope on the possibility of giving religion its due. But our constitutional theory and political philosophies have a lot of work to do before getting those problems right

How to accommodate diverse religious practices and laws within a secular framework is one of the most pressing and controversial problems facing contemporary European public order. In this provocative contribution to the subject, Lorenzo Zucca argues that traditional models of secularism, focusing on the relationship of state and church, are out-dated and that only by embracing a new picture of what secularism means can Europe move forward in the public reconciliation of its religious diversity.The book develops a new model of secularism suitable for Europe as a whole. The new model of secularism is concerned with the way in which modern secular states deal with the presence of diversity in the society. This new conception of secularism is more suited to the European Union whose overall aim is to promote a stable, peaceful and unified economic and political space starting from a wide range of different national experiences and perspectives. The new conception of secularism is also more suited for the Council of Europe at large, and in particular the European Court of Human Rights which faces growing demands for the recognition of freedom of religion in European states. The new model does not defend secularism as an ideological position, but aims to present secularism as our common constitutional tradition as well as the basis for our common constitutional future.

This paper deals with one of the most important issues of philosophy of law and constitutional thought: how to understand clashes of fundamental rights, such as the conflict between free speech and privacy. The main argument of this paper is that fundamental rights may clash in such a way that no rational solution can be advanced. I call these conflicts 'constitutional dilemmas.' However, we should not despair: when we define precisely what amounts to a genuine conflict of fundamental rights, most of the cases will appear to be spurious conflicts, which can be rationally dealt with.