From Paper to Flesh: The Personification of the Turkish Constitution

That Turkey’s constitutional order has changed dramatically under the Justice and Development Party government is clear.  How that change happened and what it means from a constitutional law perspective are questions we are still grappling with.  The project focuses on these latter questions.

 

While there is a burgeoning literature on the methods deployed in transitioning Turkey’s constitutional order (which partly answers the how question), there has been little engagement with what this transition means for Turkish constitutional law. The project will try to show that the transition that has taken place is one of deliberate shrinking of what I term “constitutional interpretive communities,” defined as people and/or institutions who meaningfully and authoritatively engage in generating constitutional meaning.  The past two decades, as the project hopes to clarify, have served to drastically decrease the number of people and institutions that can meaningfully engage with the constitution—to such an extent that the activity of generating constitutional meaning has arguably been reduced to a one-person endeavor.