Constitutional dialogue has become an influential concept to understand
the relationship between courts and other the institutional branches of the state, with
the primary focus being on legislatures. More recently, the place of dialogue within
the constitutional literature has been challenged as vague; providing a potential to
over-reach or overstate the judicial role and distorting the reality of practices which
in fact shape the relationship between courts and other institutions. Critics have
placed into focus the question: should constitutional scholarship abandon ‘constitutional
dialogue’ as a way of understanding the relationship between courts and
other institutions within the constitutional order? This article seeks to respond to this
question by arguing that constitutional dialogue remains an important aspect of
understanding the development of constitutional understanding about inter-institutional
roles but does so by acknowledging the criticisms levelled against constitutional
dialogue. Developing this approach, the argument made in this article seeks to
recast the theoretical foundations of dialogue in constitutional theory by shifting the
understanding of dialogue away from its normative and descriptive tethers. In its
place, constitutional dialogue should be considered in the context of a philosophical
understanding of language and the role that it plays to create constitutional meanings
and experiences. Dialogue has a deeper and more significant register than a
metaphor conveying a ‘conversation’, ‘communication’ or a ‘deliberative
rationality’ between the institutions of the constitutional order—dialogue must be
understood through the perspective of language as disclosing a world of common
meaning and experience.

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• End of the Conversation or Recasting Constitutional Dialogue?