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. The vote was largely caused
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. In order to successfully amend Article 5, however, a
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
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
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
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
An Argument for Venezuelan Exceptionalism:
This is a response to Miguel Schor’s timely and well thought out follow up to my post on the Venezuelan Enabling Act of 2010. Dr. Schor raises some excellent points regarding the way in which local events can be viewed contextually as part of a greater paradigm shift in Latin American politics. For my part,
What are the best books and articles of 2010?
I would like to follow up Tom’s suggestion that we look forward to what 2011 might bring us constitutionally speaking by taking a look back at 2010. Which monographs and articles written in 2010 are worth reading? My suggestion is David Robertson, The Judge as Political Theorist: Contemporary Constitutional Review (Princeton U. Press 2010). It
On this Day in the History of Comparative Constitutional Law
Forty-two years ago today in 1969, Canada bade farewell to Ivan Rand, a former Associate Justice of the Canadian Supreme Court, who passed away at age 84. In his judgments, Rand made frequent and effective use of foreign legal and constitutional materials to decide matters of purely domestic law. He was an early advocate of
Whither constitutions in 2011?
The turning of the year provides an opportunity to look back at 2010 and ahead at 2011. One of the big themes in 2010 was executive attempts to extend their stay in office: we observed various strategies in Georgia, Sri Lanka, the Philippines and elsewhere. Indeed, in the final week of the year, three countries’
