Professor Aileen Kavanagh's The Collaborative Constitution Shortlisted for Inner Temple Book Prize 2026
Professor Aileen Kavanagh, Chair of Constitutional Governance at the Trinity College Dublin School of Law, has been shortlisted for the Inner Temple Book Prize 2026 for her book, The Collaborative Constitution (2023).
Congratulations to Professor Aileen Kavanagh whose book, The Collaborative Constitution (2023), has been shortlisted for the Inner Temple Book Prize 2026, a ‘major prize for outstanding authorship’ awarded triennially by the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple in London. The Inner Temple Book Prize ‘attracts entries from every part of the globe, and has already become one of the highest honours that legal authorship can aspire to’: About the Book Prize | The Inner Temple. The prize winners will be announced at an awards ceremony at the Inner Temple on December 2nd 2025.
Professor Aileen Kavanagh holds the Chair of Constitutional Governance at the Trinity College Dublin School of Law, where she is the inaugural Director of the TriCON, the Trinity Centre for Constitutional Governance. The Collaborative Constitution was published by Cambridge University Press in 2023.
Praise for The Collaborative Constitution:
‘In this enormously impressive work, Aileen Kavanagh argues that constitutions achieve their purposes best when the three branches collaborate in defining and enforcing constitutional rights, with each branch recognising the strengths and weaknesses of the others. She backs up her normative argument with detailed studies of the real world of lawmaking in the United Kingdom that show collaboration in action. The Collaborative Constitution is one of those rare field-defining works that will stimulate discussion and further scholarship for years to come’ Professor Mark Tushnet, Harvard Law School.
‘In her magisterial new book, Aileen Kavanagh provides an elegant and timely alternative to the courts versus legislature binary for protection of rights and the Madisonian conception of separation of powers as premised on institutional rivalry and conflict. Combining theory with UK and comparative experience, she makes a powerful case that, as both descriptive practice and normative ideal, constitutionalism is a collaborative enterprise among all branches of government that ultimately depends more on unwritten norms and culture than institutional design’ Professor Stephen Gardbaum, UCLA School of Law
‘This book offers a new vision of the constitutional separation of powers – one guided by the idea of shared responsibility for constitutional implementation, and notions of comity and mutual respect. Kavanagh points to the UK as a model of this approach in action, but all democracies, as they engage in the project of constitutional self-government, have much to learn from this model and Kavanagh’s ideas’, Professor Rosalind Dixon, UNSW, Australia
‘The Collaborative Constitution is one of the most interesting contributions produced by the legal academia in recent years. It is a clear, easy to read and at the same time profound book, in which its author, Professor Aileen Kavanagh, investigates what is the best and most justified way to protect rights in a democracy. The book offers lucid answers to the dilemmas posed by the problem under examination. And it does so, at the same time, in a forceful and challenging way, which serves the author to clearly differentiate her views from many of the unfertile dichotomies that prevail in contemporary doctrine’, Professor Roberto Gargarella, Professor of Constitutional Theory and Political Philosophy at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (Argentina) and University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona (Spain)
‘Aileen Kavanagh’s important book, The Collaborative Constitution, offers a deep, insightful, and optimistic analysis of constitutional theory that aims to displace the conventional narrative that pits judicial supremacy and the institution of judicial review against a form of legislative supremacy that would take constitutions away from the courts. Kavanagh’s alternative is a collaborative constitution—in which the constitutional order is structured via interactions between judicial, legislative, and executive institutions and actors’, Professor Lawrence Solum, Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Virginia Law School.
‘Aileen Kavanagh has written a book that is beautiful in both words and in sentiment. She deftly paints a vision of the separation of powers that goes ‘beyond the forms to norms’ and privileges ‘inter-institutional comity’ [or] ‘that respect which one great organ of the State owes to another’, Professor Erin Delaney, Leverhulme Professor of Comparative Constitutional Law, UCL
‘In this excellent book, Aileen Kavanagh argues that the protection of human rights and other constitutional values has to be a collaborative endeavour … this is an important and original book. Aileen Kavanagh’s command of the literature is evident from the bibliography … The learning is lightly worn, for Kavanagh’s thesis is advanced in lively and attractive prose. The Collaborative Constitution challenges a number of fashionable scholarly positions’, Professor Jonathan Morgan, University of Cambridge.