This book offers a new account of modern European constitutionalism. It
uses the Irish constitutional order to demonstrate that, right across
the European Union, the national constitution can no longer be
understood on its own, in isolation from the EU legal order or from the
European Convention on Human Rights. The constitution is instead
triangular, with these three legal orders forming the points of a
triangle, and the relationship and interactions between them forming the
triangle's sides. It takes as its starting point the theory of
constitutional pluralism, which suggests that overlapping constitutional
orders are not necessarily arranged 'on top of' each other, but that
they may be arranged heterarchically or flatly, without a hierarchy of
superior and subordinate constitutions. However, it departs from
conventional accounts of this theory by emphasising that we must still
pay close attention to jurisdictional specificity in order to understand
the norms that regulate pluralist constitutions. It shows, through
application of the theory to case studies, that any attempt to extract
universal principles from the jurisdictionally contingent interactions
between specific legal orders is fraught with difficulty. The book is an
important contribution to constitutional theory in general, and
constitutional pluralism in particular, and will be of great interest to
scholars in the field.
