Blog of the International Journal of Constitutional Law

Month: November 2014

  • Call for Papers–Workshop on Comparative Constitutional Amendment

    —Richard Albert, Boston College Law School Boston College Law School and the International Association of Constitutional Law’s Research Group on Constitution-Making and Constitutional Change invite submissions for a full-day workshop on comparative constitutional amendment, to be held on the campus of Boston College Law School on Friday, May 15, 2015.

  • Is a Federal Britain Now Inevitable?

    –Stephen Tierney, Professor of Constitutional Theory in the School of Law, University of Edinburgh and Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Constitutional Law; ESRC Senior Research Fellow, ESRC Centre on Constitutional Change. The Smith Commission Report issued today promises a restructuring of the United Kingdom which may prove to be more significant than the devolution settlement of 1997-98 itself; the acquisition of extensive tax and welfare powers would make Scotland one of the most autonomous regions in western Europe.

  • Call for Nominations: Richard M. Buxbaum Prize for Teaching in Comparative Law

    —Richard Albert, Boston College Law School Call for Nominations Richard M. Buxbaum Prize for Teaching in Comparative Law The Younger Comparativists Committee (YCC) of the American Society of Comparative Law (ASCL) invites nominations, including self-nominations, for the first annual Richard M.

  • Video Interview: Courts and Constitution-Making Featuring Will Partlett

    —Richard Albert, Boston College Law School In this installment of our new video interview series at I-CONnect, I interview Will Partlett on the role of courts in constitution-making. In the interview, we discuss constitution-making in general, his recent work on constitution-making in Russia and post-communist countries, as well as the relationship between political culture and constitutional structure.

  • What’s New in Comparative Public Law

    –Patrick Yingling, Reed Smith LLP In this weekly feature, I-CONnect publishes a curated reading list of developments in comparative public law. “Developments” may include a selection of links to news, high court decisions, new or recent scholarly books and articles, and blog posts from around the comparative public law blogosphere.

  • Should Prisoners Have the Right to Assisted Suicide?

    —Michèle Finck, University of Oxford Recently, a Belgian inmate, convicted of murder and rape, received a lethal injection. Most Europeans would feel nothing short of a shock when reading these lines. After all, the death penalty has been abolished in most European States in the aftermath of WWII, and is now outlawed by Protocol No.

  • The Internet Tax Debate: Genuine Freedom of Assembly vs. the Illusion of Direct Democracy in Hungary

    —Zoltán Pozsár-Szentmiklósy, ELTE University, Budapest On October 21, 2014, Hungarian government officials announced that in the 2015 state budget they would include a tax on internet data transfer. This so-called internet tax was widely criticized in the media and in civil society.

  • Video Interview: “Bills of Rights in the Common Law” Featuring Robert Leckey

    —Richard Albert, Boston College Law School In this installment of our new video interview series at I-CONnect, I interview Robert Leckey on his forthcoming book entitled “Bills of Rights in the Common Law,” to be published by Cambridge University Press in May 2015.

  • What’s New in Comparative Public Law

    –Margaret Lan Xiao, Washington University in St. Louis In this weekly feature, I-CONnect publishes a curated reading list of developments in comparative public law. “Developments” may include a selection of links to news, high court decisions, new or recent scholarly books and articles, and blog posts from around the comparative public law blogosphere.

  • Against All Odds: The Kurds, Comparative Constitutionalism and Kobane

    —Erin McGrath, University of Pittsburgh While the world watches the conflict carry on in Kobane, just over the Turkish border with Syria, important facts are understated in the press. The Kobane battle is the latest front in the effort by the Islamic State (IS), an armed terrorist group, to reestablish the Islamic Caliphate across Iraq and Syria.