Can rights constitutionalism operate as a social democratic restraint on private power? How should we assess this? Following renewed interest in social democratic legal theory, some propose developing more egalitarian forms of rights constitutionalism as a counterweight to overweening private power in the global economy. Such strategies follow a normative methodology, associated with liberal accounts of legality which emphasize the autonomy of law as an external means of social change. This can be contrasted with traditional social democratic accounts of law (...) as an artifact produced through and in political struggle. This shift of focus to normative argument is at the expense of contextual diagnosis, which remains valuable in questioning whether constitutional strategies can restrain private power in the name of substantive equality. Rights constitutionalism, reflecting its classical liberal roots, continues to protect private power in important ways.; Two strategies, based in innovations in North American and European constitutionalism respectively, have been proposed to overcome this default. First, the Application to State Institutions (ASI) model seeks to extend the reach of constitutional application to include private actors, and; second the Application to Law (LAW) model seeks to extend the scope of rights by requiring all law to conform to constitutional guarantees, including equality. A sociologically grounded analysis of the comparative jurisprudence shows these models retain key elements of the classical liberal framework, such as the state-civil society distinction, and which have in practice militated against any significant democratization of private power. (shrink)