Constitutional Property Rights and Elision of the Transnational

Abstract

Neo-liberal thought has for some time been shaping policy outcomes in many parts of the world. According to the neo-liberal frame, the economy functions as an internal limit on government. Scholars of comparative constitutional law mostly are disinterested in seeking out evidence, both inside and outside of states, of neo-liberal values being channelled by constitutionally relevant actors and institutions. Recent work in comparative property rights, purporting to be attentive to culture and context, is taken up by way of example. Turning subsequently to Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics, neo-liberal thought is understood as productive of new forms of legality, like international investment law, and of new subjectivities, such as one that conjoins liberal rights with economic interests. Comparative property theorists, by contrast, rely on forms of juridical right disassociated from the global economic context, oddly failing to account for a critical part of contemporary debates over global property rights.