Category: Analysis
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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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Greece’s Constitutional Revision Dilemmas
–Xenophon Contiades and Alkmene Fotiadou, Centre for European Constitutional Law Greece is about to revise its Constitution. The question is why now and towards which direction. The timing is connected to the prerequisites of the amending formula, which sets a mandatory time lapse between revisions, that is, revision of the Constitution is not permitted within…
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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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The Modern Liberum Veto
—Richard Albert, Boston College Law School For many, the bête noire in the United States Constitution is Article V. Sanford Levinson says that it “brings us all too close to the Lockean dream (or nightmare) of changeless stasis.” Bruce Ackerman calls it an “obsolescent obstacle course.”
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The First Amendment’s Global Dimension
—Timothy Zick, William & Mary Law School In my forthcoming book, The Cosmopolitan First Amendment (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2013—Part I of the book is available here), I discuss the manner in which the First Amendment’s various guarantees relate to and intersect with international borders.
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Reforming Canada’s Senate
–Michael Pal, University of Toronto While the Canadian constitutional model has proven to be an influential one,[1] the unelected federal Senate is the dirty little secret at its heart. Last week by way of the reference procedure[2] the federal government sought the Supreme Court’s guidance on the constitutionality of various options for Senate reform.
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Drafting Independence: The Catalan Declaration of Sovereignty and the Question of the Constituent Power of the People in Context
–Zoran Oklopcic, Department of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University On January 23, 2013 the Catalan Parliament adopted the Declaration of Sovereignty and Right to Decide of the Catalan People.[1] The Declaration proclaims ‘the people of Catalonia’ to be ‘a sovereign political and legal subject’ with a ‘right to decide … their collective political future’.
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Constitutional Text and Political Reality in China
—Richard Albert, Boston College Law School The New York Times recently published an interesting article on the Chinese Constitution. As the article reports, Chinese reformers are lobbying the government to live up to the commitments entrenched in the Constitution. These reformers see a disjuncture between the constitutional text and political reality in China, and they want…