Politics 323: Debt, Law, and Politics

In recent years the issue of debt—individual debt, institutional debt, sovereign debt—has burst forth into public life in a manner that increasingly raises pressing questions for political democracy and constitutional order.  Financial crises have produced constitutional crises and vice versa. As example, threats by the U.S. Congress to default on public debts promised to produce a financial meltdown as well as a constitutional one, as constitutional theorists attempted to locate the “least unconstitutional” option for resolving the matter. This course will explore the complex interaction between creditor-debtor relations and theories of constitutionalism. Questions to be explored in the course include: What is the implication of the inequality lurking in debtor-creditor relationships for the constitutional presumption of equal citizenship and the ideal of comity between nations? Is the legal fiction of a sovereign constitutional “people” a challenge to the ascendancy of post-national financial power or a precondition of it? To what extent does the constitutional language of right, contract, and obligation contradict or marginalize concepts of mercy, forgiveness, and friendship?