Canada and Israel in Comparative Constitutional Perspective: The (Sometimes Overlooked) Legal Historical Dimension of Globalization

Abstract

Constitutional development in both Canada and Israel abounds with the enduring marks of historical globalization phenomena. For Canada, achieving a unified political formation through confederation related to reconciling French Canadian, British and aboriginal dynamics, each of which possesses its own globalized dimension. Constitutional development in Israel is equally multi-faceted. Not only the population within the state’s effective control was and remains diverse, Israel inherits (not without controversy) the biblically-inspired notion of the Jewish state as well as a religiously-grounded understanding of basic legal categories from another globalized franchise, the Ottoman Empire, all while purporting to maintain an unequivocal commitment to contemporary Western legal culture. In order to better recognize and integrate such phenomena within the broader process of constitutional development in both Canada and Israel, the article explores the viability of a hermeneutical framework based on the underlying moral bases of federalism, as facilitated by the institute of unwritten constitutionalism.