Category: Analysis
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Constitutional Dialogue v2.0? Contentious Government Responses to the Supreme Court of Canada
—Jonathon Penney, Dalhousie University and University of Oxford Constitutional “dialogue” used to be the fashion in Canadian legal circles. From the late 1990s to mid-to-late 2000s, legal scholars engaged in contentious debates on the topic and the Supreme Court of Canada itself invoked the metaphor in a series of judgments to describe, and theorize, the relationship between the Court and…
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Buddhist Constitutionalism in the Hidden Land of Bhutan
—Darius Lee, National University of Singapore A century after Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, the secularisation hypothesis has since come under serious challenge. Modernity has not resulted in the universal decline of religion. There has even been a rise of theocratic constitutional orders in the last century.
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Constitutions and the Politics of Recognition: Some Australian Observations
—Dylan Lino, PhD Candidate, Melbourne Law School; Visiting Researcher, Harvard Law School Constitutions are a major site of contestation in what Charles Taylor has influentially termed the ‘politics of recognition’. As marginalised groups struggle to have their identities properly respected within public institutions, attention frequently turns to the contents of constitutions and the ways in…
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Mandates, Manifestos & Coalitions: UK Party Politics after 2010
—Tom Quinn, Essex University [Cross-posted from UK Constitutional Law Blog] One of the most important assumptions underlying this view of British politics since 1945 was that governments were given mandates by voters in elections. That followed from the fact that they were directly elected by voters, as there were no post-election coalition negotiations to intervene…
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Direct Democracy and Constitutional Change: Institutional Learning from State Laboratories in the USA
—Jurgen Goossens, Ph.D. Candidate Ghent University, LL.M. Yale Law School Although the federal constitutional amendment procedure in Article V of the U.S. Constitution has not been altered since its adoption 226 years ago, constitutional tradition in the 50 states has substantially evolved.
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The Italian Senate Under Reform: From Disguised Unicameralism to a True Regional Second Chamber?
—Antonia Baraggia, University of Milan After the recent attempts to reform the Irish and the Canadian Senates, the Italian second chamber is also undergoing a process of profound transformation. The issue of reforming the Italian second chamber is not a recent development.
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The True Face of Disgust–A Comment on Japanese Constitutional Politics
–Kenji Ishikawa, Professor, University of Tokyo Faculty of Law Amongst the representative postwar works of Takami Jun – a writer little commented upon today – one finds the novel A Feeling of Disgust.[1] Its first-person narrator, speaking to readers in an informal, colloquial register, is a working-class anti-intellectual at odds with the claustrophobic mood of…
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Judicial Activism and Forced Displacement: Lessons from the Colombian Paradox
—Cesar Rodríguez-Garavito, Universidad de los Andes and Dejusticia, and Diana Rodríguez-Franco, Northwestern University and Dejusticia Forced displacement affects millions of people in the world and entails a violation of basic human rights. In many countries, given the lack of institutional capacity, the main way of addressing this issue is through international human rights law and…
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Leaving Westminster: Constitutional Supremacy in an Independent Scotland
–Stephen Tierney, Professor of Constitutional Theory, University of Edinburgh and Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Constitutional Law; ESRC Senior Research Fellow, Future of the UK and Scotland programme On 16 June the Scottish Government unveiled its Scottish Independence Bill in an address by Nicola Sturgeon, Deputy First Minister of Scotland, to the Edinburgh Centre for Constitutional…
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Time and Sequence in Changes of Constitutional Regimes
—Andrew Arato, The New School for Social Research Introduction The concept of the constituent power emerged in the revolutions of the 17th and 18th centuries. Many new constitutions since then were made through variety of non-revolutionary processes. Yet, the normative link between democratic forms of constitution making and revolution, deeply embedded in the notion of…