Category: hp
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Further Changes Proposed to the Turkish Constitutional Court
Late last year, in September 2010, Turkish voters approved by 58% of the vote a set of constitutional amendments, which included a court-packing plan that expanded the size of the Turkish Constitutional Court from eleven to seventeen seats (which I discussed here).
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Independent Institutions in Iraq
The Iraq Federal Supreme Court (FSC), following a petition by Prime Minister Maliki’s office, has just ruled that independent commissions such as the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) and the Central Bank of Iraq are to be attached to the executive branch.
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Three Modalities of Comparison: Arizona’s Exceptionalism?
For comparativists, South Africa is a gold mine. It offers comparative law scholars a rich repository of judgments that often develop in exquisite detail instructive comparisons between and among states. Of course, this is not a matter of happenstance. South Africa’s constitutional text actually commands courts to compare in some instances and also invites courts…
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Iowa Supreme Court Crisis?
In November, the people of the State of Iowa voted not to retain three of their seven Supreme Court Justices. Nothing like this had ever happened before. The result received national and international attention, given the real dangers that the vote poses to separation of powers and an independent judiciary.
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Amending the Unamendable Constitutional Clauses in Honduras?
The Honduran congress has passed, by the required supermajority, a reform to constitutional Article 5 that refers to the requisites to call for a plebiscite or a referendum as well as to the scope of issues that can be decided using those mechanisms of direct democracy.
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A Comparativist Joins the German Constitutional Court
The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany will welcome a new judge in 2011: Prof. Dr. Susanna Baer, an enthusiastic comparativist whose work probes a number of fields including human rights, gender equality, law & religion, and legal theory. Baer, who most recently held a professorship at the Humboldt University Berlin, has written a number of…
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The Canadian angle to the Ugandan High Court’s ruling
Follow-up on Tom’s very timely coverage of the Ugandan High Court decision forbidding a tabloid newspaper from publishing the names and pictures of suspected homosexuals (and urging that they be killed). The CBC reports on the Canadian angle to this story: the Ugandan decision cited with approval a 2002 Saskatchewan Court of Queen’s Bench decision…
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Supreme Court Presidents: Administrative or Jurisprudential Influence?
The justices of the Mexican Supreme Court (MSC) have just elected, as they do every four years, a new president. Whereas the President of the US Supreme Court can exert considerable jurisprudential influence (with, for instance, its power to assign cases to fellow justices), the president of the MSC wields considerable influence over the administration…
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Uganda High Court finds anti-gay discrimination, enjoins paper
Uganda has received a good deal of attention since anti-homosexual legislation was proposed in parliament in 2009. Though the legislation has still not been passed, the environment for gays in Uganda remains by all accounts harrowing. Today, the High Court ruled that a newspaper story which listed the names and addresses of homosexuals under the…