Adrian Vermeule, The System of the Constitution, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, 220 pp, hb £22.50.
| Published date | 01 November 2012 |
| Author | Thomas E. Webb |
| Date | 01 November 2012 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2012.00941_3.x |
But there may also be instrumental reasons.The editors do not introduce the
evidence here but it has been suggested that the Council’s decisions have resulted
in concentrated material impacts in discrete cases, captured the attention of other
corporations who risk disinvestment and are concerned with reputational effects,
developed jurisprudence on corporate responsibility and contributed to norm
acculturation as institutional investors start to factor in human rights considera-
tions. One must also be alert to the negative effects. Chesterman acknowledges
that the Council risks creating the ‘artifice of a trial in which a company’s
conduct is examined and judged without serious consequences’, resulting in the
‘illusion of accountability’ and a waning of ‘demand for actual change’ (63).
Economic globalisation has fragmented and transformed State sovereignty,
facilitating what some call a new age of neo-medievalism, a phenomenon where
‘overlapping authorities crisscrossing loyalties’ co-exist in a global or universal
society (H. Bull, The Anarc hical Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) 246). Ethical
investment guidelines and the creation of the Norwegian Council of Ethics
represent both a response to and an example of such neo-medievalism. The
authors in the book highlight the potential contribution of this new institution
but ultimately note that addressing corporate complicity for human rights vio-
lations will require much more ambitious forms of regulation,even if it is difficult
to see, today, how they will emerge.
Malcolm Langford*
Adrian Vermeule,The System of the Constitution, NewYork:Oxford University
Press, 2012, 220 pp, hb £22.50.
In The System of the Constitution, Vermeule outlines a new way of analysing
constitutional systems. According to this new method, the constitutional system
is said to consist of two levels of aggregation, individual-institutional and
institutional-system, comprised of people and institutions and also ‘propositions
of fact, morality or law’(24). The analysis is developed through complex systems
theory, a method that will be unfamiliar to many European scholars, who
associate systems theory with autopoiesis. This approach is applied in order to
reveal the limitations of traditional ways of examining the constitutional arrange-
ments of the United States, allowing the author to position his version of systems
analysis as a method that is not subject to such limitations.
Systems theory is an ambiguous term. It encompasses a variety of approaches
including autopoiesis, complexity theory and general systems theory. The
meaning of systems analysis as relating to complexity theory is only implicit in
the book.Vermeule makes reference to ‘emergent properties’(3), the importance
of ‘interaction’ (8), how the system is ‘not reducible’ to its parts (8), and ‘selection
*Faculty of Law, University of Oslo.
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© 2012 TheAuthors. The Modern Law Review © 2012The Modern Law Review Limited.
1182 (2012) 75(6) MLR 1175–1188
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