Hybrid Constitutionalism The Politics of Constitutional Review in the Chinese Special Administrative Regions

This is the first book that focuses on the entrenched, fundamental divergence between the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal and Macau's Tribunal de Última Instância over their constitutional jurisprudence, with the former repeatedly invalidating unconstitutional legislation with finality and the latter having never challenged the constitutionality of legislation at all. This divergence is all the more remarkable when considered in the light of the fact that the two Regions, commonly subject to oversight by China's authoritarian Party-state, possess constitutional frameworks that are nearly identical; feature similar hybrid regimes; and share a lot in history, ethnicity, culture, and language. Informed by political science and economics, this book breaks new ground by locating the cause of this anomaly, studied within the universe of authoritarian constitutionalism, not in the common law-civil law differences between these two former European dependencies, but the disparate levels of political transaction costs therein.

1. The rise of hybrid constitutionalism; 2. A transaction cost theory of hybrid constitutionalism; 3. Hybrid by constitutional design; 4. Comparative constitutional review in the Chinese special administrative regions; 5. Transaction cost politics in Hong Kong and Macau; 6. Epilogue; References; Index.

This book makes a significant contribution to the comparative constitutional law and politics of hybrid regimes, those that are neither liberal democratic nor closed autocracies, whose number is on the rise everywhere in the world. It takes as its case studies China's two Special Administrative Regions: Hong Kong and Macau.

Eric C. Ip is an Associate Professor of Law at The University of Hong Kong. His award-winning research on comparative public law has been published in peer-reviewed periodicals such as The American Journal of Comparative Law, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies and International & Comparative Law Quarterly. He is the author of Law and Justice in Hong Kong (2016). Prior to joining The University of Hong Kong, he taught at University College London and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.