Author: Richard Albert
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The End of Liberal Constitutionalism in Hungary?
–Gábor Halmai, Professor of Law, Eötvös Lóránd University (Budapest) and Visiting Research Scholar, Princeton University Last month, on March 11, the Hungarian Parliament voted on the fourth amendment to the the country’s 2011 constitution which has moved many statutory provision into the constitution despite Constitutional Court rulings striking them down and the European Union, the…
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Book Review/Response: Claudia Haupt and Markus Thiel on Church and State in Germany and the United States
[Editor’s Note: In this installment of I•CONnect’s Book Review/Response Series, Markus Thiel reviews Claudia Haupt’s recently-published book Religion-State Relations in the United States and Germany: The Quest for Neutrality. Claudia Haupt then responds to Markus Thiel’s review.] —Markus Thiel, Professor of Public Law, University of Applied Sciences for Public Administration North Rhine-Westphalia, Cologne, and Associate…
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Crisis Averted? Foreign Domestic Helpers, the Basic Law and Hong Kong’s Court of Final Appeal
–Alvin Y. H. Cheung, Barrister-at-Law, Sir Oswald Cheung’s Chambers, Hong Kong In the Vallejos Evangeline Banao v Commissioner of Registration & Another judgment handed down on 25 March 2013,[1] the Hong Kong Court of Final Appeal (“CFA”) held that, on a proper construction of article 24(2)(4) of the Basic Law, the constitutional document of the Hong…
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Socioeconomic Rights and Constitutional Legitimacy in India
—Rehan Abeyratne, Jindal Global Law School In a forthcoming article, I examine socioeconomic rights in the Indian Constitution and the increasingly central role the Supreme Court plays in their enforcement. As Nilesh Sinha recently noted on this blog, India’s judicial independence has allowed the Court to secure broad socioeconomic justice, despite allegations of corruption and…
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Ireland’s Constitutional Convention Considers Same-Sex Marriage
—Eoin Carolan, University College Dublin With some time to pass before the US Supreme Court delivers its keenly-watched ruling in U.S. v. Windsor, arguments about constitutional rights and same-sex marriage are due to receive another outing this weekend as part of Ireland’s ongoing Constitutional Convention.
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The Ombudsman as an Institution of European Administrative Law
—Dr. Julia Haas, Attorney-at-law (Rechtsanwältin), Hamburg (Germany) The ombudsman is presumably one of the most important Scandinavian contributions to worldwide constitutional development. Its origins can be traced back to the Swedish institution of the Justitieombudsman which was introduced in the Swedish constitution of 1809.
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Why *Judicial* Review: A Preliminary Typology of Scholarly Arguments
—Richard Albert, Boston College Law School It was perhaps inevitable that the advent of written constitutionalism would quicken the rise of judicial review. The writtenness of a constitution creates a ready-made argument in favor of judicial review, namely that the constitutional text sets the standard against which the constitutionality of governmental action must be measured,…
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Zimbabwe’s New Constitution
—Richard Albert, Boston College Law School Zimbabweans will vote to approve a new constitution on Saturday. Drafting a new constitution was a condition of the 2008 coalition formed between political rivals President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai. The draft constitution is the product of a 25-member committee on which all three political parties…
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The Unamendable Corwin Amendment
—Richard Albert, Boston College Law School Article V entrenches rules to formally amend the United States Constitution. It has been used to make and memorialize many democratic advances since the country’s founding, from the First Amendment’s protections for speech and religion, to the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equality, to the Twenty-Sixth Amendment’s expansion of the…
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Book Review: Jeremy Waldron’s “The Harm in Hate Speech”
—Raphael Cohen-Almagor, University of Hull, reviewing Jeremy Waldon, The Harm in Hate Speech (Harvard University Press 2012) In Political Liberalism, John Rawls asserts that no society can include within it all forms of life. He explains that intolerant religions will cease to exist in well-ordered societies.