Author: Richard Albert
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Designing Administrative Law: Free Trade vs. Accountability Networks
—Francesca Bignami, Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School In seeking to guarantee market access, international trade regimes generally include not only a substantive component, for instance a commitment to non-discriminatory product safety regulation, but also a procedural component designed to ensure that foreign firms can make themselves heard in the domestic administrative process.
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Canadian Election Administration Goes to Court
—Michael Pal, SJD Candidate and Trudeau Scholar, Faculty of Law, University of Toronto Prior to yesterday’s eagerly anticipated decision in Opitz v. Wrzesnewskyj, 2012 SCC 55 [“Opitz”], the Supreme Court of Canada had not been called upon to resolve a disputed election since 1942, when the Court annulled the result of a federal district election.
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Putting New Wine Into Old Wineskins—Same-Sex Marriage in the African Context: Upholding Traditional Values and Defining Human Rights
—Kwame Frimpong, Founding Dean and Professor of Law, GIMPA Law School (Accra, Ghana) The issue of same-sex marriage is not only controversial but also highly emotive, particularly within the African context. On the one hand, it raises both religious and traditional undertones.
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Will Democracy and Constitutionalism Mix in Myanmar?
—Dominic J Nardi, Jr, University of Michigan Department of Political Science Myanmar’s[1] constitution – adopted after a controversial referendum in May 2008 – created the country’s first constitutional court in half a century. Initially, few if any observers believed the Constitutional Tribunal would play a significant role.
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Our Electoral Exceptionalism
—Nicholas Stephanopoulos, Assistant Professor, University of Chicago In all countries that employ single-member districts (or small multimember districts), redistricting is a vital issue. How districts are drawn influences, among other things, how competitive races will be, how many members of minority groups will be elected, and which party will control a majority in the legislature.…
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In Search of Alternative Standards for the Adjudication of Socioeconomic Rights
—Carlos Bernal, Senior Lecturer, Macquarie University Socioeconomic rights are one of the greatest innovations of contemporary constitutionalism, in particular, of developing countries. Some of their constitutions address the issues of poverty, unsatisfied basic needs, lack of resources for the exercise of freedoms and political rights, and unequal distribution of opportunities and wealth, by means of…
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Local Injustice: Why We Shouldn’t Forget about Saif Gaddafi
—Ruti Teitel, 2012-13 Straus fellow at NYU School of Law, Ernst C. Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law at New York Law School, and author of Transitional Justice (OUP 2000) and Humanity’s Law (OUP 2012). In the London newspaper the Daily Mail, Saif Gaddafi’s longtime girlfriend, Orly Weinerman, has asked that Saif be spared prosecution…
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The German Constitutional Court and Europe
[By Russell Miller, Professor of Law at Washington & Lee University, co-author of the forthcoming The Constitutional Jurisprudence of the Federal Republic of Germany (3d ed. 2012)] On 12 September 2012 the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) is set to announce its ruling on requests for temporary injunctions that would keep President Gauck from giving his…
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Call for Papers–Annual Meeting of the American Society of Comparative Law
The Younger Comparativists Committee of the American Society of Comparative Law is pleased to invite submissions to fill a panel on “New Perspectives in Comparative Law,” to be held at the Society’s 2012 Annual Meeting in Iowa City, Iowa, on October 4-6 at the University of Iowa College of Law.
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Nepal’s Constitutional Future
Yesterday, Nepali Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai dissolved the Constituent Assembly after it failed to create a new constitution by its midnight deadline. Prime Minister Bhattarai subsequently scheduled elections to form a new assembly in November. The principal challenge of constitutional design in Nepal concerns federalism, specifically the promise and peril of creating an ethnic-based federalism…