You are cordially invited to the seminar organised by Bilkent University Faculty of Law.
“Understanding the Legality of Constitutional Adjudication”
Çağrı Gürkanlı University of Cambridge
Faculty of Law
9 July 2025, Wednesday – 13:30
Art Gallery, Main Campus Library
The seminar will be held in English.
It is commonplace among constitutional theorists to assume that constitutional law is inherently political or ought to be understood within a political context. It is unclear, however, what this assumption entails for the explanation of constitutional phenomena, and in particular, constitutional adjudication. An increasingly popular approach, usefully referred to as constitutional realism, argues that since constitutional adjudication is essentially political, it must be explained in terms of political motivations and outcomes. Thus, constitutional realism challenges the foundations of constitutional theory by presupposing that normative legal considerations and interpretive problems, seemingly intrinsic to the practice of adjudication, are explanatorily insignificant. This challenge accordingly raises an important question: how are we to understand constitutional adjudication between the legal and the political? If the realist account is correct, the autonomy of the legal domain is undermined, and constitutional adjudication collapses into political decision-making. I argue, therefore, that constitutional realism, if understood as the only or the correct way to explain the nature and workings of constitutional adjudication, is an incoherent and insufficient explanatory paradigm. I suggest that, in cases where an established constitutional tradition allows for a legal domain that is autonomous from the contingent demands of politics, interpretive explanations based on legal reasons must be preferred over realist explanations.
Çağrı Gürkanlı completed his undergraduate law degree at Bilkent University, where he also obtained a minor degree in political science. He holds a Magister Juris (MJur) from the University of Oxford, as well as an MA in Philosophy from Bilkent University. Gürkanlı is currently finishing his PhD at the University of Cambridge. Trained in multiple disciplines, he aims to integrate insights from philosophy, law, and politics. His PhD thesis, The Hermeneutical Reality of Law: Understanding the Legality of Constitutional Adjudication, exemplifies this approach, developing a novel account of constitutional adjudication grounded in philosophical analysis. He contributed to academic projects with Cambridge University Press and TÜBİTAK, and led various academic forums such as the Cambridge Legal Theory Discussion Group (CLTDG). Gürkanlı has taught legal and political philosophy at both undergraduate and graduate levels at the University of Cambridge and Bilkent University. He has been awarded scholarships such as the Cambridge Trust and Jean Monnet Scholarships for his academic achievements. He has a chapter on constituent power and national will that is forthcoming in an edited volume to be published by Cambridge University Press in early 2026.