Verfassungsblog (Aug 2022)
The Language of Power
Abstract
Professor Tarunabh Khaitan’s ICON editorial on “scholactivism”, as well as his September 2021 Letten Prize lecture on „The Role of the Legal Scholar in the World“ are unsettling. Although stepping aside and standing by may feel satisfactorily pure and avoids tensions as well as personal attacks in a post-truth world, it is not neutral – simply because any activity relating to constitutional law, active or passive, is inevitably a statement about politics and power. Instead, constitutional lawyers have a professional obligation to explicate in the public debate what forms the implicit basis of all conversation between them: the very relevance of the law to power and politics.
