BOOK REVIEW Legality, Legitimacy, and Democratic Constitution Making A. Arato, Post Sovereign Constitution Making: Learning and Legitimacy. OUP, 2016; A. Arato, The Adventures of the Constituent Power: Beyond Revolutions? CUP, 2017; J. Colón-Ríos, Weak Constitutionalism: Democratic Legitimacy and the Question of the Constituent Power. Routledge, 2012. Nicolás Figueroa García-Herreros 1 Published online: 27 March 2019 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 What makes a constitution democratically legitimate? What kind of constitution making process is more likely to yield democratic and constitutionalist outcomes? These are two of the central questions guiding the work of Andrew Arato. With the recent publication of Post Sovereign Constitution Making and The Adventures of the Constituent Power , Arato signifi- cantly advances his decades long project of a normatively informed sociology of constitutional change. His main argument is historical in character: a post sovereign model of constitution making has emerged “out of the adventures of the revolutionary and populist idea of the sovereign constituent power” 1 . However, this is also an argument with normative implications: the fundamental weakness of sovereign constitution making is its elective affinity to dictator- ship 2 , a political danger made evident by the history of modern revolutions. To the contrary, the post sovereign paradigm’ s transcendence of the revolutionary and populist logics of political action offers an alternative conception of the constituent power that is “more faithful to the values of both democracy and constitutionalism” 3 . For Arato, the study of these two models of constitution making is highly relevant: “constitution making and remaking pertains to the highest level of law making, the political design and allocation of power within a polity. Jus Cogens (2019) 1:97–109 https://doi.org/10.1007/s42439-019-00007-9 1 Arato 2017, p. 1. 2 By elective affinity Arato refers to the logical links between a model of constitution making and a set of likely consequences derived from its practice. He accepts that a causal link between these models and the consequences he attributes to them can only be fully demonstrated by means of large N methodologies including more cases than the ones he studies in his books. Arato 2017, p. 366. However, he believes that these large N studies should avoid excessive formal analysis; they must include comparisons of specific case studies that pay more detailed attention to history. Arato 2016, p. 299. 3 Arato 2017, p. 1. * Nicolás Figueroa García-Herreros nicolas.figueroag@urosario.edu.co 1 Facultad de Jurisprudencia, Universidad del Rosario, Bogotá, Colombia