CLT Book Launch: “Democracy despite Itself” by Assistant Professor Benjamin A. Schupmann, Yale-NUS College

In the book launch “Democracy despite Itself” held on 16 October 2024 by the Centre for Legal Theory (CLT), Professor Benjamin A. Schupmann discussed how his book advances a liberal normative theory of militant democracy to address the existential threat to democracy posed by ‘legal revolution’. He elaborates on how ‘militant democracy’ refers to the use of measures of constitutional entrenchment to defend democracy while legal revolution occurs when democratically elected actors use legal procedures to undermine democratic constitutional essentials, evident today in countries like Hungary, India and Turkey. He discussed the ways in which the book further develops its normative theory by combining John Rawls’ political liberalism and Carl Schmitt’s constitutional theory to argue that basic liberal rights are an essential part of the democratic constitutional framework and that the state has the right to defend its democratic political identity against internal challenges.