President Donald Trump’s ascendance to the White House has been understood as signaling a breakdown in American global leadership.
March
2025
We are grateful to the organizers of The University of Chicago Law Review Symposium for inviting us to contribute to this issue and to the participants of the symposium on May 12–13, 2017, for the constructive criticism they offered on our preliminary draft of this Essay. For their helpful suggestions on our argument, we would also like to thank Devon Carbado, Cheryl Harris, Ran Hirschl, Aziz Huq, Darryl Li, Odette Lienau, Hiroshi Motomura, Samuel Moyn, K-Sue Park, Intisar Rabb, Kim Scheppele, Noah Zatz, and the participants at the Yale Law School’s 2018 Middle East Legal Studies Seminar meeting in Lisbon. We are also grateful to Laura Bloom and Sam Millang for excellent research assistance.
President Donald Trump’s ascendance to the White House has been understood as signaling a breakdown in American global leadership.
In the wake of World War II, liberal constitutionalism emerged as a default design choice for political systems across Europe and North America. It then diffused more widely across the globe as a whole.