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I. INTRODUCTION Public law provides a "rule-based," or "normative," framework for the practice of politics by creating a concept of public, legal power and specifying how public power is to [...], As the articles in this Symposium suggest, populism and authoritarianism present ongoing challenges not only to liberal democracy but also to its legal underpinnings. Manipulation, avoidance, evasion, and outright rejection of the constitutional and legal frameworks of liberal democracy are features of populist authoritarianism. The basic argument of this article is that liberal-democratic public law and legal theory no longer satisfy human needs and desires because they were conceived in worlds that no longer exist, when the main pre-occupation was to secure liberty, not equality. The aim of the article is to explain the inherited structure of our public law and theory and the main events and developments that have produced this mismatch between public law and social aspiration. Cite as: Peter Cane, Executive Primacy, Populism, and Public Law, 28 WASH. INT'L L.J. 527 (2019).

In a very common way of thinking, a constitution is a formal document with legal - indeed, supreme legal -force, deliberately adopted to Tegulate the governance of apolity. Under this "synthetic" approach, constitutional law is the law in the document. In an older "organic" tmdition, still extant in a few modern systems, a polity s constitution is made up of its system of government and the norms according to which governance is conducted. As A. V. Dicey famously observed of the English organic constitution, while some norms of the constitution are legal - made (and if enforceable, enforced) by legal actors - others are political-made (and ifenforceable, enforced) by political, not legal, actors. Dicey called such political norms "conventions of the constitution". Today, organic constitutions are often thought of as "marginal" and Tipe f# replacement by synthetic constitutions. However, the organic model deserves our attention if only because it constructs the Telationship between law and politics veTy differently than the synthetic model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]