Przemysław Tacik Unwelcome Excess of the Law On the Critique of Populist Constitutionalism Abstract: Te aim of the paper is to provide a critical inquiry into the structure of discourses that build up contemporary analyses of populist constitutionalisms. As the legal scholarship struggles to reconfgure itself in order to address the changing boundaries between law and politics due to the rise of illiberalism, it ofen falls into traps of myths and clichés. Te paper attempts to identify the main assumptions of the currently dominant episteme, which makes legal scholarship straddle between the legacy of undermined liberalism and the raw political intervention of populism. In order to nuance the scholarly look on the ongoing transformations of legality, I suggest perceiving illiberalism as a hybrid work in progress that confronts liberal legality, but also draws from it and is thus haunted by irremovable excess and internal pitfalls. Keywords: constitutionalism, populism, post-fascism, illiberalism 1 Introduction Te peculiarity of our times consists in their liminal character: new currents of politico-legal life already exist, but the inherited old forms are not yet ready to grasp them� As a result, we tend to think about the ongoing evolution of Western poli- ties in terms which are not fully adequate, if not misleading� Surprisingly for legal scholarship – especially legal theory and constitutional law – it perhaps no longer ofers the best conceptual tools to understand the transformations of our era� Now, perhaps, philosophy and the humanities give terms that due to their generality and speculative distance are more apt to avoid being trapped in simplifcations that obsolete intellectual forms are prone to impose� Tat the existing legal scholarship has a problem with understanding the authoritarian trends of our time is clearly evidenced by a stunning career of the word ‘populism�’ By contrast with political science which eagerly searches for operationalisable defnitions of populism, 1 legal scholars rather prefer to either 1 Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (University of Pennsylvania Press 2016); Cas Mudde, Cristobal Rovira Kaltvasser, Populism: A Very Short Introduction (OUP 2017); Benjamin De Cleen, Jason Glynos, Aurelien Mondon, ‘Critical Research on Populism: Nine Rules of Engagement’ (2018) 25 Organization 649; Benjamin De