This book provides a systematic account of the role of distributive justice in the normative legitimation of liberal constitutions. The requirements of distributive justice are highly contested, and constitutions are susceptible to influencing those they govern. Rosenfeld suggests that liberal constitutions must incorporate "justice essentials".

Michel Rosenfeld is the University Professor of Law and Comparative Democracy, Justice Sydney L. Robins Professor of Human Rights and Director of the Program on Global and Comparative Constitutional Theory at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of Yeshiva University. He teaches in the areas of legal philosophy and US and comparative constitutional law. He has lectured throughout the world and is the author of numerous books, which have been translated into eleven foreign languages. He was the founding editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Constitutional Law (2000-2014) and the president of the International Association of Constitutional Law (1999-2004).

• Introduction: Liberal Constitutional Democracy, its Illiberal Challengers, and the Question of Distributive Justice


• PART ONE: NEW CHALLENGES AND THREATS


• 1: Disembodied Law, Reinvigorated Religion, and Tribal Politics


• 2: Local versus Global, Material Well-Being, States of Stress, and the Erosion of Justice


• PART TWO: REVISITING AND RECONFIGURING THE PHILOSOPHICAL GROUNDING OF LIBERAL CONSTITUTIONALISM'S IDEAL OF JUSTICE


• 3: Confronting the Gulf Between Law and Solidarity: Kelsen Encounters Freud


• 4: Law Redux: Schmitt, CLS, and the Drift to Politics; From Posner Back to Marx and the Absorption of Law into Economics


• 5: Kantian Universalism Reframed for a Post-Totalitarian Age: The Legacy of Rawls, Habermas and Dworkin


• 6: Tragic Deconstruction Set Against the Impenetrable Singular and Reconstruction as Spectacle and Administration: From Derrida to Agamben


• PART THREE: BUILDING A COMMONLY SHARED BASIS TOWARD A PLURALIST INCLUSIVIST CONSTITUTION


• 7: The Dialectics of Comprehensive Pluralism: Approaching the Justice Essentials from the Middle


• 8: Justice Essentials Minima and Comprehensive Pluralism's Fixed Core Minimum Set Against its Plural Maximum


• Conclusion