The World Trade Organization and Fitzpatrick’s ‘New Constitutionalism'

This chapter is grounded in Peter Fitzpatrick’s examination and theorisation in a number of works, including "Modernism and the Grounds of Law" (Cambridge University Press, 2001) of the relationship between the national and international, or more specifically, the mutually constitutive relationship between national and international law. The chapter argues that an effect of this mutual constitution, has been – precisely as a result of the pretension to constitutionalism at the international level of the international economic law institutions, and especially the WTO - the seeping into the national constitutional-consciousness of economic or market rights.