Ritual and Constitutionalism: Disputing the Ruler's Legitimacy in a Confucian Polity

This Article argues that in order to understand the constitutional categories of a polity governed by Confucian norms, we must seize upon the idea of ritual as the key concept. By describing the Confucian view of "ritual" as the basis for political legitimacy, the Article shows how constitutional norms and discourse were articulated through interpretations of ritual. Then, through a discussion of a historical controversy over ritual that took place in seventeenth-century Korea, the Article reveals the workings of Confucian "ritualist" constitutionalism in action. It shows that much like modern constitutional debates, the ritual controversy was a clash between different views on the proper degree of finality in the interpretation of constitutional norms. It then proposes that the ritual controversy can be analyzed as a constitutional crisis in at least three ways: first, as a prolonged political strife caused by inconsistent precedents; second, as a breakdown of dialogue between different interpretive voices, and third, as a collapse of epistemic foundations underlying people's conception of the polity's constitution. Throughout the Article the author engages in a dialogue with modern constitutional scholarship, thereby shedding new light on the study of comparative constitutional law as well as pre-modern East Asian law.