Category: Analysis
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Four Models of Politicized Judicial Selection
—Richard Albert, Boston College Law School Judges on national courts of last resort are generally appointed in politicized processes. Judicial selection is politicized when the choice rests on popular consent mediated in some way through elected representatives. We can identify four major models of politicized judicial selection in constitutional states: (1) executive unilateral appointment; (2)…
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Socioeconomic Rights and Constitutional Legitimacy in India
—Rehan Abeyratne, Jindal Global Law School In a forthcoming article, I examine socioeconomic rights in the Indian Constitution and the increasingly central role the Supreme Court plays in their enforcement. As Nilesh Sinha recently noted on this blog, India’s judicial independence has allowed the Court to secure broad socioeconomic justice, despite allegations of corruption and…
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How Precedent Travels
–Sam Halabi, University of Tulsa In a recent Article forthcoming in the Notre Dame Journal of International and Comparative Law, “Constitutional Borrowing as Jurisprudential and Political Doctrine in Shri DK Basu v. State of West Bengal”, I explore one aspect of the countermajoritarian difficulty engendered by use of foreign precedent.
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The Ombudsman as an Institution of European Administrative Law
—Dr. Julia Haas, Attorney-at-law (Rechtsanwältin), Hamburg (Germany) The ombudsman is presumably one of the most important Scandinavian contributions to worldwide constitutional development. Its origins can be traced back to the Swedish institution of the Justitieombudsman which was introduced in the Swedish constitution of 1809.
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Why *Judicial* Review: A Preliminary Typology of Scholarly Arguments
—Richard Albert, Boston College Law School It was perhaps inevitable that the advent of written constitutionalism would quicken the rise of judicial review. The writtenness of a constitution creates a ready-made argument in favor of judicial review, namely that the constitutional text sets the standard against which the constitutionality of governmental action must be measured,…
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Greece’s Constitutional Revision Dilemmas
–Xenophon Contiades and Alkmene Fotiadou, Centre for European Constitutional Law Greece is about to revise its Constitution. The question is why now and towards which direction. The timing is connected to the prerequisites of the amending formula, which sets a mandatory time lapse between revisions, that is, revision of the Constitution is not permitted within…
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The Unamendable Corwin Amendment
—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…
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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.”
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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.