—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
Book Review: Jeremy Waldron’s “The Harm in Hate Speech”
—Raphael Cohen-Almagor, University of Hull, reviewing Jeremy Waldon, The Harm in Hate Speech (Harvard University Press 2012) In Political Liberalism, John Rawls asserts that no society can include within it all forms of life. He explains that intolerant religions will cease to exist in well-ordered societies. Coercive religions that demand the suppression of other religions, that insist upon
I·CON 11 Issue 1: Editorial
I have invited Ran Hirschl, who has recently joined our Board of Editors, to write the Editorial for the first issue of 2013. His contribution follows below. From comparative constitutional law to comparative constitutional studies Eighty years ago, John H. Wigmore, author of the seminal Panorama of the World’s Legal Systems, characterized the comparative law journals
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.” And Donald Boudreaux and A.C. Pritchard describe it as
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. The book takes an extended and systematic look at what might
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. This
Preview of I·CON’s next issue (Table of Contents)
I·CON Volume 11 Issue 1 Table of Contents Editorial Articles Or Bassok and Yoav Dotan, Solving the countermajoritarian difficulty? Asem Khalil, Beyond the written constitution: Constitutional crisis of, and the institutional deadlock in, the Palestinian political system as entrenched in the basic law Adam Shinar and Anna Su, Religious law as foreign law in constitutional
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’. The
Get ready for new battles over Japan’s Constitution
–Lawrence Repeta, Meiji University Faculty of Law Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is focused on the economy — check out the collapse of the yen and the boom in the stock market since he took center stage. In his policy speech to open the new Diet session on January 28, Abe talked about the economy and
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
