This book addresses a phenomenon of growing importance in constitutional law worldwide: the application of constitutional rights not just to the state but also to private individuals. It opens with a clear diagnosis: courts and constitution-makers are increasingly willing to hold employers, landlords, sports clubs, and other nonstate entities responsible for failing to uphold constitutional obligations. This is important: “The move from vertical to a horizontal model changes who is responsible—that is, the very orientation of the rights relationship” (4).

Readers steeped in the Anglo-American constitutional tradition might meet the phenomenon with surprise and even skepticism. In the Anglo-American tradition, the main purpose of constitutional rights is to protect individuals from the state. Horizontal application does not square well with this idea. Horizontality breaks down the public-private divide and allows the constitution to reach deep into the private sphere. It hands the government a large mandate to direct private behavior, so that private actions must conform to the constitution.

Bambrick’s core argument is that the horizontal application of rights does not represent a departure from liberal constitutionalism but a layering of republican motifs within it. It reflects a “republican vein in liberal constitutiona