In my view, one of the major projects of contemporary constitutionalism is finding ways of holding democratic decision making accountable to core values. The standard way of doing so is to constitutionalize rights and establish some kind of judicial review, which authorizes courts to overturn governmental action that violates those rights. But this rhetorical and institutional form of using rights as standards of legitimacy has many widely recognized limitations. Most of those limitations have to do with the lack of democratic legitimacy – which goes beyond the basic problem of courts overturning the decisions of elected legislatures.

Here I present feminist constitutionalism as part of my broader project of seeing constitutionalism as a dialogue of democratic accountability. I will argue that feminist constitutionalism invites us to 1) reimagine the scope of practices and institutions that should be held accountable to core values, 2) reimagine the forms of deliberation about those values and their practical meaning, and 3) reimagine multiple forms of accountability – so that judicial review becomes only one highly specific and democratically limited mechanism. The project of rights implementation becomes less state focused, as does the process of deliberation and accountability – while recognizing that there always remains the question of how existing law structures relations in ways that perpetuate inequality. This just is no longer the sole focus.