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Constitutional Bricolage: Thailand’s Sacred Monarchy vs The Rule of Law.

Eugenie Merieau.

Hart Publishing. 2022.

ISBN: 9781509946815.

Constitutional Bricolage is a monograph by French legal scholar Eugénie Mérieau. It offers a theoretically ambitious, historically grounded account of how Thailand’s monarchy has become constitutionally entrenched, not despite the rule of law, but through it.

Mérieau’s central claim is counterintuitive: in Thailand, the Constitution is not a weak or ignored document; rather, it is the foundation of royal and military authority. Against the common view that the king’s power rests on informal charisma, tradition, or a failed transplant of Western constitutionalism, she argues that royal prerogatives are doctrinally constructed and legally justified using sophisticated interpretations of constitutional texts, case law, and legal theory.

To capture this, she coins the concept of “constitutional bricolage”: a creative process in which Thai elites (drafters, judges, scholars, politicians) selectively borrow, and hybridize foreign constitutional models (civil law, common law, German jurisprudence, etc.) with local Buddhist-Hindu doctrines of kingship to produce a distinctive, semi-authoritarian constitutional order.

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Coram Deo — before the face of God. This blog reflects on Scripture, world events, science, music, psychology, and the human mind — always through the lens of Christian faith. All of life is lived before the face of God.