Chairs
• Armin von Bogdandy bogdandy@mpil.de
• Carolina Bejarano Martínez bejarano-martinez@mpil.de
• Selin Esen selin.esen71@gmail.com

Comparative public law has long concentrated on national constitutions, legal families, and institutional interactions across courts and international regimes. More recently, global constitutionalism has emerged as a dominant paradigm, analysing transformations in the international legal order through constitutional categories such as the Rule of Law, separation of powers, constituent power, and rights. Yet, whilst these perspectives offer valuable insights, they risk overlooking the intermediate level of analysis where regional particularities decisively shape constitutional developments. This workshop proposal introduces ‘regional comparative constitutional law’ as a framework that bridges the gap between national and global analyses, emphasising the constitutional significance of regions as units of legal comparison.

Building on political science and international relations scholarship, the proposal situates regions as social constructions that reflect both geographical contiguity and normative interactions. Processes of institutionalised regionalism, such as those embodied by the European Union, coexist with dynamics of regionalisation generated by transnational political, economic, and cultural flows. Together, these processes give rise to distinctive regional orders. Whilst this scholarship has largely neglected the constitutional dimension of regional integration and ordering, the workshop aims to place law at the centre of such processes, exploring how constitutional norms and practices both shape and are shaped by regional dynamics.

The framework of regional comparative constitutional law entails a two-tiered comparative methodology. First, intra-regional comparisons assess how constitutional law contributes to defining regional orders and how regional societies generate constitutional phenomena with distinctive characteristics. Second, inter-regional comparisons build on these intra-regional findings, juxtaposing different regional orders to identify similarities, divergences, and potential cross-regional lessons. This dual approach, however, raises methodological and theoretical challenges. Among them are the selection of representative cases, the definition of ‘regional constitutional law’ in ways that capture internal diversity without sacrificing comparability, and the task of accounting for hegemonic regional influences exerted by powerful single-state actors such as Russia or China.

Existing scholarship has made important advances in this direction. European Union law has consolidated itself as a robust field of regional constitutional scholarship, offering a model of institutionalised regionalism with constitutional implications. Similarly, the Ius Constitutionale Commune en América Latina (ICCAL) project has underscored the regional dimension of Latin American constitutionalism, articulating shared principles and practices across national boundaries. Nonetheless, the inter-regional dimension remains underexplored, leaving significant questions open: What forms of regional constitutionalism emerge in the Caribbean, Eurasia, Asia, the Middle East, or Sub-Saharan Africa? How do regions interact with each other’s constitutional frameworks, and under what conditions do inter-regional dynamics foster convergence, conflict, or mutual learning?

By addressing these questions, the workshop seeks to advance both conceptual depth and methodological clarity in the study of regional comparative constitutional law. It highlights the potential of regional perspectives to enrich the study of comparative law by grounding analyses in concrete contexts whilst generating insights for inter-regional dialogue. In doing so, it aspires to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of constitutionalism in a world increasingly structured by regional and inter-regional dynamics.