—Richard Albert, Boston College Law School In this installment of our new video interview series at I-CONnect, I interview Ozan Varol on trends in modern authoritarianism. In the interview, we discuss how modern authoritarians use constitutional design and the law to serve their objectives. We also discuss recent scholarship on the subject, including a paper on Stealth
—Richard Albert, Boston College Law School In this installment of our new video interview series at I-CONnect, I interview Benito Aláez Corral on developments in Spanish constitutional law. In the interview, we explore the constitutional implications of secession, the tension between realizing the promise of socio-economic rights and the increasing financial pressures on the state, the role of Parliament in
—Ragnhildur Helgadóttir, Reykjavik University School of Law The Icelandic draft constitution of 2011 has received wide attention, including on this blog. One reason for that is the emphasis placed on public participation in the drafting process. In its (otherwise quite critical) opinion, the Venice Commission (the European Commission for Democracy through Law) wrote: The wide range
–Leiv Marsteintredet, Associate Professor in Latin American Area Studies, University of Oslo; Associate Professor in Comparative Politics, University of Bergen In a recent blog post on I-CONnect,[1] Jillian Blake discusses the very disturbing constitutional and legal developments on the right to nationality in the Dominican Republic and argues that they were facilitated by “…the unstable nature of the
—Jillian Blake, University of Michigan In a 2010 article, Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez describes “Wiki-constitutionalism”—a phenomenon common to Latin American legal systems in which national constitutions are “changed with great frequency and unusual ease.”[1] The Dominican Republic’s system is a stark example of Wiki-constitutionalism; the country has had more than 30 constitutions since achieving independence in 1844.[2]
—Richard Albert, Boston College Law School An important race is underway in Alberta, one of Canada’s ten provinces. In September, paid-up members of the Progressive Conservative Party will elect a new party leader, and the new leader will become the premier of Alberta. One of the candidates, Jim Prentice, a former federal Cabinet minister and
—Jonathon Penney, Dalhousie University and University of Oxford Constitutional “dialogue” used to be the fashion in Canadian legal circles. From the late 1990s to mid-to-late 2000s, legal scholars engaged in contentious debates on the topic and the Supreme Court of Canada itself invoked the metaphor in a series of judgments to describe, and theorize, the relationship between the Court and
—Darius Lee, National University of Singapore A century after Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, the secularisation hypothesis has since come under serious challenge. Modernity has not resulted in the universal decline of religion. There has even been a rise of theocratic constitutional orders in the last century. The goal of constitutionalism is limited
—Dylan Lino, PhD Candidate, Melbourne Law School; Visiting Researcher, Harvard Law School Constitutions are a major site of contestation in what Charles Taylor has influentially termed the ‘politics of recognition’. As marginalised groups struggle to have their identities properly respected within public institutions, attention frequently turns to the contents of constitutions and the ways in
—Tom Quinn, Essex University [Cross-posted from UK Constitutional Law Blog] One of the most important assumptions underlying this view of British politics since 1945 was that governments were given mandates by voters in elections. That followed from the fact that they were directly elected by voters, as there were no post-election coalition negotiations to intervene
Welcome to I·CONnect: the blog of the International Journal of Constitutional Law.
A letter from the Editor-in-Chief of I·CON
Welcome message from Tom Ginsburg
Editorial Director, I·CON: J. H. H. Weiler
Editors, I·CONnect: Richard Albert,
Tom Ginsburg and David Landau
EJIL: Talk!
