Sparked by the pioneering interventions of Stephen Gill (1995a, 1998b, 2000, 2003), the literature on the new constitutionalism has provided an illuminating basis for conceptualizing the market-disciplinary regulatory reorganization of world capitalism since the 1980s. This work represents an important contribution to the ongoing debate on neo-liberalism, which has long been a lightning rod for discussions of contemporary capitalism, its regulatory dynamics, its crisis tendencies and its possible futures.

Studies of new constitutionalism have focused primarily on the worldwide legal architectures of market-disciplinary regulation, and have tended to emphasize the geopolitical institutionalization of marketizing, commodifying rules since the 1980s. Whereas the formation of global rule-regimes has been investigated in detail by analysts of new constitutionalism, less attention has been devoted to the role of inter-jurisdictional policy transfer networks and processes of regulatory experimentation at both the national and subnational scales. Building upon the concept of variegated neo-liberalization (Brenner et al. 2010), we argue that systematic attention to each of the latter dimensions of regulatory restructuring can strengthen the methodological apparatus for studies of new constitutionalism: it could provide the basis for analyzing the evolution of neo-liberalization tendencies, and of formations of new constitutionalism itself. Through such an approach, moreover, one can productively explore scenarios for counter-neo-liberalizing forms of regulatory restructuring within contemporary capitalism.