Societal Constitutionalism in the Digital World: An Introduction

Abstract

This paper introduces the symposium issue of the Indiana Journal of Legal Studies dedicated to ‘Digital Constitution: On the Transformative Potential of Societal Constitutionalism’, where a group of scholars, using societal constitutionalism as a background theory, presents concrete proposals for a digital constitutional law. In this way, the symposium issue seeks to answer three interrelated questions. What is the message of societal constitutionalism for the emerging digital constitution? How can fundamental principles of nation-state constitutions be generalized and re-specified for global digitality with a transformative outlook? What would new institutional arrangements and interpretive practices look like? In this introduction, we aim to overcome three reductive tendencies stemming from traditional constitutionalism’s legacy (section II). We argue that digital constitutionalism needs to look beyond (1) the still dominant state-centricity of constitutional principles, (2) their exclusive focus on political power, and (3) their narrowly individualist interpretation of constitutional rights. This deconstruction opens the view to the main constitutional threats posed by digitalization—in particular, what we call the double colonization of the digital space—and to possible counterstrategies inspired by societal constitutionalism (section III). Subsequently, we outline the content of the contributions to this symposium, grouped into four areas: (1) re-formulation of constitution- and law-making; (2) digital economy; (3) institutions of constitutionalism; (4) digital justice (section IV). Finally, we point to future developments as well as to the links to other strands of literature that focus on the relationship between digital technologies and (constitutional) law (section V).

Keywords: digital constitutionalism; societal constitutionalism, transformative law, constitutional theory, law & political economy