Constituent Power: A Concept in Renewal
Authors:   Korean Constitutional Law Asscciation, JOH DONG EUN 
Published: August 2023

The concept of constituent power is often invoked in jurisprudence and literature to account for the origin and supremacy of the constitution, the limits of constitutional amendment, and the basis of constitutional interpretation. Nevertheless, the concept of constituent power has been under criticism for quite some time, and there remains today some full-fledged arguments to dispense with it as a mythical concept, unnecessary or harmful. In order to answer the question of whether the concept of constituent power has meaning and value on the horizon of constitutional law scholarship today, it might be useful to confront these contemporary criticisms alongside a consideration of the history of the concept. A noteworthy point in the historical examination of the concept of constitutional power is the fact that Sieyès tried to distance the concept of constituent power from that of sovereignty. While Sieyès proposed ‘pouvoir constituant’ as a concept that expresses the ‘the political authority of the people’, he rejected the idea of sovereignty as a “monastic” and “colossal” that cannot give adequate explanatory function of modern form of political legitimacy. Carl Schmitt, on the other hand, who inherited the concept of constituent power from Sieyès but closely linked it to the concept of sovereignty, used the unmediated delegation of constituent power as a basis for justifying a transitional sovereign dictatorship that suspended all separation of powers. Contemporary critiques of the concept of constituent power take several forms. A positivist version suggests that the concept of constituent power as a immediate presence without representation, “das formlos Formende” is itself inconceivable. In addition, the concept reduces the question of validity and legitimacy of the legal order to the question of “who” created the constitution, while the circumstances regarding the enactment of a legal norm cannot be an independent, determinative basis for the obligation to obey the law. A normativist version argues that the concept of constituent power fails to explain coherently the problem of law's authority for it locates the source of law's authority outside the legal order. But as emphasized by Fuller and Dworkin, the authority of law is better explained by the internal morality of the legal order and this renders the concept of constituent power unnecessary. The former view contends that constitutions can only be justified in terms of their conformity to extralegal moral and practical considerations, and thus a concept of constituent power that centers on the question of “who” made them loses its importance. The latter view argues that constitutions can be justified through internal morality of the law itself, and thus the question of constitutional authority that locates the source of their authority outside the legal order is not raised in the first place. The view that the constituent power is “das formlos Formende”, the presence of the people without representation, however, may be just one interpretation of constituent power, but not the only one. Rather, Sieyès' concept which emphasizes the limited powers of the extraordinary representative in constitution-making, seems to be closely linked to considerations on the process of representation. In addition, understanding constitution-making power as extra-legal authority without any normative dimension or ‘plenitudo potestatis’, free of any legal constraints seems to be a distinctively Schmittian interpretation. It should not be overlooked that the concept of the constitution that the critiques presuppose underscores the meaning of positive ‘written’ constitution as a product of actual political processes. However, it is necessary to consider in a serious manner the problem of mystification and possible misuse of the concept of constitutional power that these criticisms highlight.