Abstract
This special issue builds on the existing - but still modest set of - scholarly reflections on the relation between law and populism, making a strong case for the need for more extensive, systematic, comparative, and fine-grained analyses. Our argument is that there is a plethora of interesting and significant dimensions to populism and law that have been largely ignored in current studies on populism.
In even stronger terms, it can be argued that the legal and constitutional dimensions are crucial to populism as a political project. Much of the current literature understands populism as an important threat or challenge to constitutional democracy (Müller 2016), human rights (cf.
Alston 2017), and the rule of law (Kelemen and Pech 2018), but tends to take a normative and simplistic view in that it pre-empirically postulates a stark contrast or dichotomy, which reduces populism to the antithesis of constitutionalism and the rule of law. In this pejorative, largely binary approach, important dimensions of constitutionalism and public law remain under-exposed and significant nuances, affinities, and complexities are left unexplored.