Tag: constitutional design
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Why Entrench Formal Amendment Rules?
–Richard Albert, Boston College Law School Constitutional changes, both big and small, are underway in Egypt, Fiji, Tunisia and elsewhere. Constitutional designers in these and other countries face daunting challenges in dividing powers between governmental branches, balancing state prerogatives with individual rights, and managing majority-minority relations.
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Creating a Constitutional Process Design for Libya via Constitutional Amendment
—Lorianne Updike Toler, The Constitutional Sources Project & Lorianne Updike Toler Consulting. The feared unrest in Libya prior to 15 February and now the confusion introduced by the Libyan Supreme Court’s decision last Tuesday to invalidate Amendment No. 3 of Libya’s Constitutional Declaration can all be attributed to the poor constitutional design of the Declaration…
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Just Deserts or Honor at Stake? India’s Pending Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill
–Nilesh Sinha In recent history, India’s constitutional adjudication has been amongst the most active in the world. Following its shameful capitulation before Indira Gandhi during the Indian emergency, the Supreme Court of India developed the tool of Public Interest Litigation (whereby a court can deliver prompt social justice, at times by taking up a matter…
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The First Haitian Constitution
—Richard Albert, Boston College Law School As we follow Haiti’s slow march toward democracy in the news, media reports often highlight that Haiti is the poorest nation in the western hemisphere and the world’s first independent black republic. Yet what is often if not always missing is this: Haiti adopted one of the first written…
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Egypt and the Forgotten Lessons of Democratic Transitions (Or: Democracy is Hard)
—David Landau, Florida State University College of Law [Editors’ Note: In this forum on Egypt and New Perspectives on Constitution-Making, three young scholars of comparative constitutional law – Ozan Varol, Will Partlett, and David Landau – discuss their recent work on constitution-making and democratic transitions, focusing on Egypt.
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The Context of Iceland‘s Constitutional Revision – Will it Doom the Draft?
– Ragnhildur Helgadóttir, Professor of Law, Reykjavík University The revision of the Icelandic constitution (see posts from Oct. 15 and 21) was an important part of the reaction to the financial crisis of 2008. Following the crash, a government had to leave office and a Parliamentary Investigative Commission handed in a black report on the…
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Making Government Work for the 99%? (And the 53%? And the 47%)?: Why we Need to Re-think the Separation in the Separation of Powers
—Eoin Carolan, Lecturer in Law, University College Dublin Has the separation of powers outlived its usefulness? After all, contemporary government bears little if any resemblance to the 18th century structures on which Montesquieu’s influential account of the separation of powers was modelled.