This paper examines some institutions of French public law and their transformations induced by European integration. It shows how institutions rooted in a specific political culture that long aimed at ensuring political liberty through the active role of la loi have been challenged by other institutions designed in the first place to protect civil liberties. It argues that the loi-based republican institutions of public law, that were inherited from the French Revolution and 18th century political thinkers, such as Montesquieu and above all Rousseau, have been significantly reshaped. That did not happen through politics, nor through another ‘French-style’ revolution. Ironically enough, it happened more modestly through law, within the meaning of le droit (and courts) as opposed to la loi (and the legislator), that is through those very means of political change that Republican France had consistently rejected ever since the Revolution. The French example showcases how paradigmatic political changes, from messianic republicanism to global constitutionalism, may thus occur, without a revolution, through the smooth medium of (European) law.

This article examines the process of drafting the authoritarian Portuguese Constitution of 1933, which took place during the military regime. The aim is to identify the powers involved, their objectives and the strategies they developed, and to find insights that shed light on the adoption of constitutions by authoritarianisms. The results suggest that conflict between political forces is endemic to the constitutional process, and that those who hegemonise support and aim to demilitarise the system are able to impose the new constitution even without guaranteeing the existence of democratic political parties. There is also a promising point of analysis: the emergence of an authoritarian constitution is based on path dependence, ie, it has many links with the material constitutionalism that precedes it, where there are already normalised authoritarian elements.

This article proposes a framework to understand questions of fairness in EU law. It builds on the scholarly literature on the meaning and scope of this concept, to then consider its relevance to legal orders and specifically the European Union’s. Having set out an umbrella definition of fairness as a legal principle, the article applies it to a specific example: namely, the system of border procedures introduced by the new asylum and migration pact. The objective of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it aims to provide a blueprint for discussing issues of fairness in the EU beyond a specific area of law and policy. Secondly, in concretely adapting that blueprint to the specificities of the ‘case study’ analysed in the paper, it sheds light on the degree of its (un)fairness.