TRANSITIONS

No one interested in contemporary comparative politics can be unfamiliar with the notion of transition. What Ruti Teitel calls "transitional jurisprudence," whose central topic is "the role of law in political transformation," 1 has become a major genre of contemporary legal analysis as the frequency of such transformations has become well-nigh dazzling, in countries and regions ranging from Albania to Uruguay and from El Salvador to South Africa.2 All of these countries represent the shift from dictatorship--or, as in the case of South Africa, an oppressive herrenvolk democracy-to a more liberal democratic order. Thus, South Africa's President, Nelson Mandela, has referred to the "remarkable movement in various regions of the world away from undemocratic and repressive rule towards the establishment of constitutional democracies." 3 There may be examples of transitions in the other direction--one may well wonder if this is not underway in contemporary Russia-but, for obvious reasons, they do not generate the same interest among liberal political theorists and constitutional theorists as do the other, presumably far happier, transitions. I consider Bruce Ackerman to be America's greatest theorist of transition, at least with respect to the fundamental legal questions attached to transitional regimes.4 Though his primary interest is transition within the