Professor REN Xirong from the School of Law at Jilin University (JLU) recently published an article titled Legalization of the Constitutional Reasoning Obligation of Legislative Bodies in the third issue of China Legal Science for 2024.

The article, based on the 2023 amendments to the Legislation Law of the People’s Republic of China, investigates the sources, diverse subjects, and functional positioning of the constitutional reasoning obligation of legislative bodies.

It highlights innovative practices in establishing a “whole-process” constitutional review mechanism covering the pre-legislation, mid-legislation, and post-legislation stages in China.

The 2023 amendments to the legislation law mandate that draft law explanations include relevant opinions on constitutional issues. The Constitution and Law Committee must also provide explanations on these issues in their reports on amendments or review results.

These changes ensure that legislative bodies must reason about the constitutionality of draft laws, not just their rationality and legality. They also formalize constitutional review at the drafting and review stages, creating a comprehensive whole-process constitutional review mechanism.

The article argues that legislative bodies must clarify the constitutionality of their legislation to uphold popular sovereignty and the rule of law. Legalizing this obligation drives institutional development, leading to comprehensive control over legislative stages and content, extending reasoning from rationality and legitimacy to legality and constitutionality.

China’s constitutional review practices address critiques of the representative body supervision model through functional division of oversight, compatibility of specific reviews, and strong democratic procedures.

These practices provide new theoretical resources for global constitutional oversight models and support the development of an autonomous knowledge system in Chinese constitutional law.