Author: rhirschl
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Awards, New Books, and a Book Series
Several recent awards, new books, and a new book series on comparative constitutional law & policy might be of interest to this blog’s readers. First, Sanford Levinson, one of the most influential, prolific and thoughtful scholars of American constitutional law, won the APSA’s Law & Courts Section Lifetime Achievement Award.
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Constitution-making in Somalia
A fascinating, first-hand account of current UN-led constitution-making efforts in war-ridden Somalia — arguably one of the bleakest, most dysfunctional corners of today’s world — is offered by Professor David Cameron of the University of Toronto’s Department of Political Science. Professor Cameron, a prominent scholar of Canadian federalism and inter-governmental relations, has long been involved…
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A Supreme Court vs. Religious Authorities Showdown in Israel
In August 2009 I wrote here about the Israeli Supreme Court ruling that involved a clash between the right to sectarian autonomy in education, and equality rights. A girls-only publicly-funded religious school introduced separation between an educational stream for Ashkenazi Hasidic community girls, and a different stream for Sephardic (Mizrahi) girls.
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Political (and constitutional) Turmoil in Belgium
In the world of constitutional design, few things could be more ironic than a country that at the same time is home to the unofficial capital of the new Europe just as its own political and constitutional future is increasingly under siege.
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Rights at Work?
For those of us who grew up in times and places where “socialist” was not considered an insulting adjective, May Day still means something. And notably more so if a person happens to live in one of the 170 countries or so where the regulation of working conditions, hours, wages, etc.
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“Targeted killings” yet again?
An interesting story from Israel. Compliance with judicial scrutiny of “process-light” measures adopted by governments to combat terrorism is certainly not limited to the post-9/11 context. Spain (ETA), Britain (Northern Ireland), or Peru (Shining Path) are merely few examples. In 1999, the Israeli Supreme Court banned the use of torture in interrogations by Israel’s General…
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The ECtHR rules on Greek-Cypriots’ Right of Return; the ECJ rules on the Economic Treaty Status of Jewish Settlements
Two important rulings from Europe reinforce the increasing significance of supra-national quasi-constitutional regimes in dealing with international political hot potatoes. In a landmark ruling the ECtHR held last week (Demopoulos et al. v. Turkey)that Greek refugees who had fled northern Cyprus during the Turkish invasion in 1974 do not have an automatic, unqualified right of…
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Czech court outlaws extreme right party
As reported in several media outlets (e.g. here), the Czech Republic’s Supreme Administrative Court has banned the far-right Workers’ Party, established in 2003. The court held that the party advocates a dangerous xenophobic, homophobic, anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi agenda and thus poses an intolerable threat to Czech democracy.
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Constitutional courts in hot political water in Bosnia & Herzegovina, and in the Republic of Macedonia
Several of the now independent countries, once republics of the former Yugoslavia are a constant source of politically signficant constitutional jurisprudence. The last week provided two illustrations. As our avid readers will recall, the European Court of Human Rights held last December that the “consociational” or “power-sharing” pact in Bosnia-Herzegovina (one of the outcomes of…
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Shoe Throwing at the Israeli Supreme Court
A strange incident at the Israeli Supreme Court — a person with a record of threatening lower court judges threw his shoes (a-la Iraqi journalist move) at no else than Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch during a Supreme Court hearing in a matter unrelated to the shoe thrower.