This is a remarkable book that opens with a bold thesis: “The reasons why a country should adopt constitutional democracy as a form of government are also reasons why it should become integrated into an international human rights regime” (p. 1). Contrary to the view that international human rights law undermines (or, at least, stands in tension with) constitutional democracy, Jamie Mayerfeld argues not simply that they are in fact compatible. He makes the more specific and stronger claim that constitutional democracy itself is incomplete in some crucial ways until and unless its domestic human rights provisions and institutions are incorporated into a larger, international framework of checks and balances devoted to the protection of human rights. As such, the book offers a valuable and much-needed reminder: International human rights law is not only about improving the practices of other countries (an “outward looking” justification) but also about improving the practices of one’s own country (an “inward looking” justification).

Organized in six main chapters, The Promise of Human Rights combines insightful theoretical discussion with an in-depth empirical analysis. The theoretical story line begins in Chapter 1, where Mayerfeld outlines a “public” conception of human rights (“public” in the Rawlsian sense that it may be endorsed on the basis of diverse philosophical and religious doctrines), and makes a preliminary case for the importance of the international institutionalization of human rights. Then, turning to James Madison’s constitutional thought and reading him against the grain as a theorist of democracy, Chapter 2 seeks to show that international human rights law is a welcome and necessary supplement to constitutional democracy on account of its very own institutional logic, that is, checks and balances. Against the background of this theoretical discussion, Chapter 3 (the first empirical chapter) looks at the European Union, and examines the ways in which transnational checks and balances have successfully improved domestic human rights practices, thereby helping constitutional democracies to live up to their own fundamental commitments. In contrast to the successful trajectory of the European Union, Mayerfeld argues, stands the failure of the United States. Chapters 4 and 5 belong together with a common title: “American Exceptionalism and the Betrayal of Human Rights.” These chapters critically trace the self-exemption policy of the United States vis-à-vis international human rights law, and demonstrate its moral and legal costs through a sustained, sober, and at times shuddering discussion of the “torture memos.” Finally, Chapter 6 gets back to the theoretical story line to engage with, and respond to, a wide range of arguments concerning the democratic credentials of an international human rights regime. The whole book is a very good read.

What stands out among the many merits of this work is the powerful and compelling analysis of the ways in which the U.S. domestic human rights institutions failed in the wake of 9/11. The failure was drastic and multifaceted. Under the notorious rubric of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the U.S. government authorized practices that constitute torture in all but name, enabled the policy of “extraordinary rendition” to outsource the practice of torture, while at the same time taking effective “legal” measures to prevent the future trial of those who were responsible. How could all this come to pass? “We need to understand,” says Mayerfeld, “not only the individual decisions and bureaucratic and legal maneuvers that constructed the policy but also the background conditions that made it possible” (p. 10). The marginalization of the international human rights law in the U.S. legal culture, he convincingly shows, was a key point.

The book does an excellent job in tracing the sources, modus operandi, and consequences of “American exceptionalism” concerning international human rights law. Since the aftermath of World War II, the U.S. resistance to the ratification of international human rights treaties has been defended on two main grounds. First, it is unnecessary because rights are already entrenched in the U.S. constitutional system (which means that international human rights law is meant to improve the practices of other countries, and that they can and should learn from the United States, but not vice versa). Second, it would violate the sovereignty of the United States and, hence, undermine the foundations of constitutional democracy. These arguments had and still have purchase: The United States has not yet ratified some of the key treaties, ratified others after decades of delay, and, more importantly, ratified them only conditionally, that is, with significant “reservations, understandings, and declarations” (RUDs).

As Mayerfeld shows in detail, the RUDs watered down the obligations arising from the treaties, and severely limited their enforcement by the U.S. courts. A key argument of the book is that this long-standing practice of rendering international human rights law unenforceable in court immensely facilitated the Bush administration’s torture policy after 9/11 because “it left interpretation of the U.S. international human rights commitments to the executive branch alone,” thereby creating the “space in which the [torture] memos could operate” (p. 146). There is a sense in which the book has a literally “take-home” message for American readers: “[P]ride in our legal institutions has turned into a trap” (p. 185).

The overarching argument of the book is powerful and convincing. What I find less convincing, however, is the justice-based conception of democracy, which is deliberately pitted against democracy as “public autonomy.” Mayerfeld defends it in Chapter 2 by drawing on Madison’s political thought. “This is a nonvoluntarist conception of democracy. The point of popular government is not to realize the people’s will (whether taken as given or refined through deliberation) but instead to foster just and wise policy” (p. 61). On this account, the ultimate political end is to promote justice—understood in terms of common good and human rights—and to do that we need a system of checks and balances, in which universal suffrage and popular participation are certainly key elements, but not the sole elements. Thus, public autonomy has an instrumental value (it is a “check”), and taking it as an end in itself, Mayerfeld seems to assume, would lead to a politics of unfettered will, a politics of “group licence.”

The problem with this argument is that it throws out the baby with the bath water. That “[d]emocracy is not group license” (p. 197) and that the exercise of popular will should be restrained by considerations of justice (statements with which I fully agree) do not mean that public autonomy has merely an instrumental value. Besides its functional role as a check mechanism, public autonomy is a freedom concept, and thus a normative principle worth defending in and of itself. Instead of subordinating one normative principle to the other, therefore, a theoretical account of constitutional democracy should, rather, attend to the ways in which human rights and public autonomy are interdependent. Mayerfeld pursues this possibility in Chapter 6 so as to show that the overarching argument of the book is compatible with different accounts of constitutional democracy, and does not specifically hinge on his own justice-based account. This is a welcome move—not only because it increases the appeal of the main argument in general, but also because it points toward a conception of constitutional democracy, one which holds that human rights and public autonomy mutually require and mediate one another at a fundamental conceptual level, and which, therefore, would provide Mayerfeld’s absolutely important central thesis with a better theoretical support than his preferred Madisonian model.