The grammar of modern constitutionalism determines the structure and limits of key components of contemporary legal and political discourse. This grammar constitutes an important part of our legal and political imagination. It determines what questions we ask about our polities, as well as the range of possible answers to these questions. The fundamental rules and principles of modern constitutionalism are continuously interpreted and reinterpreted. In order for these norms to provide specific conceptual tools for understanding, evaluating, and solving contemporary States’ basic challenges, they have to be given more specific meaning. Yet, the number of authoritative interpreters of this grammar is relatively small. Only a few institutions — such as the Supreme Court of the United States, the European Court of Human Rights and the German Constitutional Court — are considered paradigmatic operators and enforcers of modern constitutionalism’s basic rules and principles. These legal institutions are the ones that determine the paradigmatic use of modern constitutionalism’s basic norms. Of course, beneath this first level of authoritative and well-recognized interpreters, there are several other levels of institutional and scholarly interpreters of modern constitutionalism. In this hierarchy, however, the scholarship and legal products created by the Global South occupy a particularly low level. It is extraordinary to hear the name of a scholar or a legal institution from the Global South in this dialogue. This paper presents and criticizes the reasons that explain the existence of this hierarchy and the marginal position that the constitutionalism of the Global South occupies within it.