How Global is Global Constitutionalism?: Comments on Kai Moller's The Global Model of Constitutional Rights

Kai Möller’s The Global Model of Constitutional Rights¹ is an ambitious project. In this book, he aims to develop a theory of rights which could explain the main features of what he calls the “global model of constitutional rights.” These main features are as follows: rights inflation, positive obligations and socioeconomic rights, horizontal effects, and balancing and proportionality.² According to him, despite the success of the so-called global model, especially regarding judicial practice, there is still no comprehensive theory able to explain it. Still according to him, such a comprehensive theory should be able to explain which values are protected by rights and what their limits are, as well as establish the proper relation between judicial enforcement of rights and democracy.

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The main features of Möller’s theory are as follows: it is a substantive, reconstructive, and general theory, in contrast to formal, normative, or particular theories. In the...