​​My research has three overlapping strands.
 
The first strand seeks to expand political theory’s normative and analytical horizons beyond the nation-state by investigating the complex relationship between liberal democracy and international institutions. Liberal internationalists since Kant have argued that constitutional democracy remains an incomplete project without an international order built on the same liberal principles. Of course, exactly what such an international order would look like is hardly self-evident (Kant himself gave only sparse clues). In my work, I break down this challenge into a number of normative puzzles, including: What principles and norms should condition the relationship between states and international institutions (and the relationships amongst the latter)? Do international institutions themselves need to be democratic in order to bolster constitutional democracy within states? How does international cooperation affect domestic structures of representation, accountability, citizenship, and the rule of law? How far can states entrust governance functions to international institutions without undermining their commitment to popular sovereignty? Can states reap the benefits of regional and global market liberalization without watering down their obligations towards their citizens (such ensuring socioeconomic security and equal representation)? 
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In addressing  these questions, I take existing institutions as the starting point of normative analysis. Authority stands in need of justification, which means that every regime of public power short of abject tyranny provides some answer—implicit or explicit—to the question of where it acquires the right to exercise that power. By studying constitutions, treaties, decision-making procedures, court decisions, and legal enactments, I reconstruct the normative commitments that particular regimes and public institutions espouse, expose their tensions, and record the ways these commitments shape (or fail to shape) decisions, actions, and policies. 
 
My first (and so far only!) book, Europe’s Functional Constitution. A Theory of Constitutionalism beyond the State (Oxford UP, 2016), traces the European Union’s legal development from a series of interstate agreements to a supranational constitutional regime. From a methodological point of view, the book argues that mainstream constitutional theory has a lot to learn from taking the EU seriously as a case, specifically, from the way the EU deploys familiar constitutional mechanisms to new ends. Substantively, my book argues that the EU’s prioritization of economic and monetary integration has distorted practices of citizenship, constitutionalism, democratic representation, social solidarity, and human rights protection. The expansion of the EU’s power has subordinated ever greater swathes of public policy to the imperatives of maintaining a single market and common currency, with deleterious consequences for democracy and possibilities for social justice. My overarching normative claim is that configuring a political community in terms of a substantive telos (such as market integration) undermines democratic self-rule, even if that telos is an attractive one.
 
Since the publication of my book, I have written a series of essays expanding its argument in light of recent developments such as the sovereign debt crisis, Brexit, the crisis of democratic deconsolidation, and the EU’s treatment of refugees.
 
The second strand of my research investigates what I call might call off-label uses of liberal democratic institutions. We often associate certain institutions with particular political ends or values: for instance, we treat elections as instruments of democracy; constitutional rights norms as guarantees of individual liberty; judicial review as a bulwark against arbitrary power. Challenging these elective affinities, I have argued that norms and procedures we associate with constitutional democracy are protean and subject to political manipulation. Not only can we better understand the democratic value added of institutions such as elections and judicial review by observing how they work in non-democratic contexts, doing so can give us a better sense of democracy’s vulnerabilities.  

In a third strand of my research, I examine the inflationary use of human and constitutional rights by corporations, primarily but not exclusively for-profits. A key point of emphasis in my first book is the way in which the EU has endowed actors engaged in cross-border trade with a special constitutional status unavailable to other stakeholders in European integration. In a 2013 essay entitled “Citizens of a New Agora,” I argue that the dispute settlement mechanisms attached to regimes such as the WTO, NAFTA, and bilateral investment agreements allow large firms and industries (whether directly or indirectly though national trade representatives) to participate in making the norms of international trade and investment. In a 2016 article entitled “The rights of man and the rights of the man-made: Corporations and human rights,” I focus on the ways in which corporations increasingly appeal to human rights norms to beef up their claims under investment treaties, constrain host states’ policy options, evade regulatory measures, and pass on responsibility for risk to host societies. I argue that the arrogation of human rights norms by multinational corporations in the investment arbitration context not only distracts from the real purpose of human rights norms (that is, protecting vulnerable human beings), but also risks debasing the moral currency of human rights. I term this process the dehumanization of human rights.  

I am currently working on a book project entitled Are Corporate Rights Wrong?, which addresses an antecedent conceptual and normative question: are corporations ever entitled to the protection of constitutional and human rights norms? Scholars and adjudicators have long relied on the concept of personhood to determine the scope of corporations’ rights. This approach draws criticism for ignoring the morally salient distinctions between corporations and human beings. I contend that it has an equally grave failing: it cannot distinguish among entities as diverse as universities, media companies, faith organizations, and hedge funds. As a result, an arts-and-crafts retailer can claim religious freedoms equivalent to a church, and a bank’s freedom of speech can be construed as widely as that of a newspaper.

For all the moral outrage directed against corporate personhood, few have offered a compelling alternative framework by which we may judge which rights (if any) corporations are entitled to claim. My book proposes such a framework. I argue that the corporate form affords an important means for individuals to pursue their ends, express their values, and realize their life plans in association, particularly in domains that require a lasting institutional framework and secure commitment of resources. Since the corporation’s claim to moral consideration stems from its role in facilitating purposive action in concert, its rights claims deserve consideration only to the extent that they are necessary for such purposes. Furthermore, the interests that individuals have in pursuing their legitimate purposes through the corporate form must be counterbalanced against the public’s interest in regulating entities of that kind. I contend that the degree of legal protection corporations merit depends on the values they represent, the interests they advance, the goods they control, the power they exercise and on whom they exercise it.