Month: November 2010
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Analysis of the October amendments to the Constitution of Georgia
The Parliament of Georgia passed a new wave of constitutional amendments on October 15, 2010, which have seriously reconfigured the relationship between all three branches of government and have affected their rights and responsibilities. These amendments limit the rights and functions of the President in favor of the growing importance of the Prime Minister and the Parliament.
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What would happen if the U.S. repealed the 14th amendment?
So many constitutional issues came up in the context of the 2010 U.S. election that I’m just now summoning the energy to react to them. One issue was the provocative proposal by Senators Jon Kyl and Lindsay Graham (among others) to repeal the 14th amendment, or at least that part of the amendment that grants citizenship to all those born in the territory of the United States.
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Sad News
The famous German legal scholar, Professor Winfried Brugger of the University of Heidelberg, died suddenly. Besides being a leading legal philosopher, and scholar of German constitutional law, he was one of Germany’s preeminent experts on American constitutional law. He also was a frequent visitor to Georgetown Law.
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New Constitution for the US?
The Revolutionary Communist Party has issued a new draft constitution for the Socialist Republic of North America. Only the preamble is available on the website; those interested in learning more will have to buy the book. The preamble itself, full of anachronistic language, is over 2700 words long, which would, according to a recent paper of mine on constitutional specificity, make it one of the longest preambles in the world if it were ever adopted.
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New Constitution for the US?
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New paper by Kay: Constituent Authority
Richard Kay of the University of Connecticut Law School has posted a new paper, Constituent Authority, on SSRN. Its an interesting analysis of constituent power and its effect on constitutional endurance. Abstract: The force of a constitution, like the force of all enacted law, derives, in significant part, from the circumstances of its enactment.
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Zimbabwe process sputters along
Earlier this year, David Law commented on next year’s constitutional referendum in Zimbabwe and on the potential ramifications for civil rights in that country. With November deepening however, and the vote approaching, it is time to look at Zimbabwe’s constitutional chaos from another angle – separation of powers.
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Socio-Economic Rights Decline
In late 2009, several of the South African Constitutional Court’s most famous Justices were scheduled to step down. They still had to write opinions in some difficult socio-economic rights cases. To the surprise of many legal scholars, they authored opinions which appear to put the brakes on the development of a transformative socio-economic rights jurisprudence.