Making We the People: Democratic Constitutional Founding in Postwar Japan and South Korea

What does it mean to say that it is “We the People” who “ordain and establish” a constitution? Who are those sovereign people, and how can they do so? Interweaving history and theory, constitutional scholar Chaihark Hahm and political theorist Sung Ho Kim attempt to answer these perennial questions by revisiting the constitutional politics of postwar Japan and Korea. Together, these experiences demonstrate the infeasibility of the conventional assumption that there is a clearly-bounded sove...