Category: Analysis
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Amendments, Replacements and Constitutional Instability? The Case of the Dominican Republic
–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…
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Constitutional Stability Through Citizenship in the Dominican Republic
—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]
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Legislative and Executive Term Limits in Alberta
—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.
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Constitutional Dialogue v2.0? Contentious Government Responses to the Supreme Court of Canada
—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…
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Buddhist Constitutionalism in the Hidden Land of Bhutan
—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.
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Constitutions and the Politics of Recognition: Some Australian Observations
—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…
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Mandates, Manifestos & Coalitions: UK Party Politics after 2010
—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…
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Direct Democracy and Constitutional Change: Institutional Learning from State Laboratories in the USA
—Jurgen Goossens, Ph.D. Candidate Ghent University, LL.M. Yale Law School Although the federal constitutional amendment procedure in Article V of the U.S. Constitution has not been altered since its adoption 226 years ago, constitutional tradition in the 50 states has substantially evolved.
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The Italian Senate Under Reform: From Disguised Unicameralism to a True Regional Second Chamber?
—Antonia Baraggia, University of Milan After the recent attempts to reform the Irish and the Canadian Senates, the Italian second chamber is also undergoing a process of profound transformation. The issue of reforming the Italian second chamber is not a recent development.
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The True Face of Disgust–A Comment on Japanese Constitutional Politics
–Kenji Ishikawa, Professor, University of Tokyo Faculty of Law Amongst the representative postwar works of Takami Jun – a writer little commented upon today – one finds the novel A Feeling of Disgust.[1] Its first-person narrator, speaking to readers in an informal, colloquial register, is a working-class anti-intellectual at odds with the claustrophobic mood of…