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lt is a commonplace that law and morality intersect and interpenetrate in all the areas of legal decision-making; that in order to make sense of constitutional, statutory or common-law questions, judges and other legal decision-makers must first resolve certain philosophical issues which include moral judgments of right and wrang_ This is particularly evident with regard to constitutional interpretation, especially when constitutions give a mandate for the protection of the substantive norms and values entrenched as constitutional rights. In these Situations, as a leading contemporary legal philosopher observed, the "Constitution fuses legal and moral issues, by making the validity of a law depend on an answer to complex moral 1 problems". But the need for substantive value elucidation is not confined, of course, only to constitutional interpretation under Bills of Rights. This, however, immediately raises a dilemma stemming from the moral diversity and pluralism of modern liberal societies. How can law remain sensitive to this pluralism and yet provide clear answers to the problems which call for a legal resolution? Sharply conflicting values in modern societies clash in the debates over the death penalty, abortion, homosexuality, separation of state and religion, the scope of the freedom of the press, or affirmative action. lt would often be difficult to discern a broader consensus within which these clashes of values operate, unless this consensus were described in such vague terms as to render it practically meaningless.

AbstractThis short comment offers two additional arguments, missing from Geir Ulfstein's account, which may bolster the case for constitutionalisation of the ECtHR. The first is about the 'pilot judgments' through which the Court addresses systemic deficits in national legal systems and thus ensures a minimal synchronisation of human rights protection throughout the CoE system. The second manifestation of constitutionalisation of the ECHR system is the increasing role of the ECtHR in the implementation of its own judgments. Ultimately, the legitimacy for the constitutional ambitions of Strasbourg Court should be located primarily in the argumentative resources of the court and in its pursuit of 'public reason'.

AbstractIn my short comment on the new book by Alec Stone Sweet and Clare Ryan, I claim that the European Court of Human Rights does not take the 'legitimacy of state goals' step in its proportionality analysis seriously enough, relegating all its hard intellectual work to the next step: necessity scrutiny. What is puzzling about Stone Sweet and Ryan's book is that this observation about the ECtHR hardly registered in the book's argument, even though a Kantian perspective seems to be quite hospitable to a consideration of the scarcity of goal scrutiny in ECtHR case law.