Category: Analysis
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Truth-seeking in Peace Processes: Addressing Colonial Roots of Internal Conflict
—Armi Beatriz E. Bayot, University of Oxford Faculty of Law [Editors’ Note: This is one of our biweekly ICONnect columns. For more information on our four columnists for 2021, please see here.] In negotiating intrastate peace agreements,[1] an important threshold that needs to be crossed by the conflict parties is addressing the meta-conflict, i.e.,
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Shortcuts and Short Circuits in Latin American Constitutional Models: a Reading of Cristina Lafont’s Democracy without Shortcuts
—Julian Gaviria-Mira, Universidad EAFIT, Colombia In Democracy without Shortcuts, the philosopher Cristina Lafont has elaborated a compelling defense of what she calls a “deliberative-participatory democracy”. This democracy “without shortcuts” seeks to vindicate, at the same time, both deliberation in democratic institutions and strong participation of the citizens in collective self-government.
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Vietnam: Emergency Powers in Time of Pandemic and the Role of the Written Constitution
—Le Nguyen Duy Hau, Attorney at Law This blog post seeks to inform about a new constitutional development in Vietnam surrounding an enabling act formally vesting the Prime Minister (“PM”) with unprecedented emergency powers, and how such an event could provide meaningful suggestions in further research into Vietnam’s constitutional law.
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Is Polarization Necessarily Bad? Lessons from Latin America
—Juliano Zaiden Benvindo, University of Brasília and National Council for Scientific and Technological Development [Editors’ Note: This is one of our biweekly ICONnect columns. For more information on our four columnists for 2021, please see here.] Polarization is what several political scientists and constitutional scholars have pointed out as possibly the most troubling sign of…
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Choosing Scylla: climate change vs. private property in Chile’s new constitution
—Ernesto Vargas Weil, Assistant Professor, University of Chile and Associate Lecturer, University College London Climate change is here to stay. A few weeks ago, the UN Secretary-General argued that the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group was ‘a code red for humanity’, urging Governments to take immediate action, especially in containing greenhouse…
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One Weird Trick To Defeat Judicial Review: Process as Outcome
—Matthew Reid Krell, Lecturer of Law, University of the West Indies Cave Hill As I write this, a puzzling event has occurred in the United States: the law governing access to abortion has changed. But it changed without Congress enacting a law, without the Supreme Court issuing a ruling, and in fact, without anyone taking…
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When Judges Unbound Ulysses: the Case of Presidential Reelection in El Salvador
—Manuel Adrian Merino Menjivar, Professor of Constitutional Law, Universidad Gerardo Barrios, El Salvador In Ulysses Unbound, Jon Elster understands constitutions as a precommitment made by the people to themselves. According to the myth on which he bases his metaphor, when Ulysses returned from the Trojan War, he had to pass through the Isle of Sirens,…
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Constituent Power and the Politics of Unamendability
—Mara Malagodi, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law; Rehan Abeyratne, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law; and Ngoc Son Bui, The University of Oxford [Editors’ Note: This is one of our biweekly ICONnect columns. For more information on our four columnists for 2021, please see here.]
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Understanding Identity and the Legacy of Empire in European Constitutionalism: The Case of Hungary
—Marina Bán, Postdoctoral Researcher, Centre of Excellence for International Courts, and Jennifer Pullicino Orlando, PhD Student, University of Copenhagen Introduction Hungary’s 2011 Fundamental Law is exemplary of mnemonic constitutionalism and the shaping of identities through the deployment of a defensive nationalism.
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Legal Possibilities in the Dissolution Case against the Peoples’ Democratic Party in Turkey
—Tolga Şirin, Associate Professor of Constitutional Law, Marmara University, Turkey. Turkish politics involves a graveyard of political parties, which have been dissolved since the Republic’s early years. Unfortunately, the world record in this regard probably belongs to Turkey, where the courts have, so far, dissolved at least twenty-four political parties with communist, Islamist, or pro-Kurdish…