Category: Analysis
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Making Government Work for the 99%? (And the 53%? And the 47%)?: Why we Need to Re-think the Separation in the Separation of Powers
—Eoin Carolan, Lecturer in Law, University College Dublin Has the separation of powers outlived its usefulness? After all, contemporary government bears little if any resemblance to the 18th century structures on which Montesquieu’s influential account of the separation of powers was modelled.
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Constitutional Comparativism and Splendid Isolation?
—Jaakko Husa, Professor, Legal Culture and Legal Linguistics, University of Lapland, Finland Long gone are the days when comparative law was ruled by private law scholars only. After the collapse of socialism we have experienced a global expansion of constitutionalism, judicial review, and human rights.
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Designing Administrative Law: Free Trade vs. Accountability Networks
—Francesca Bignami, Professor of Law, George Washington University Law School In seeking to guarantee market access, international trade regimes generally include not only a substantive component, for instance a commitment to non-discriminatory product safety regulation, but also a procedural component designed to ensure that foreign firms can make themselves heard in the domestic administrative process.
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Putting New Wine Into Old Wineskins—Same-Sex Marriage in the African Context: Upholding Traditional Values and Defining Human Rights
—Kwame Frimpong, Founding Dean and Professor of Law, GIMPA Law School (Accra, Ghana) The issue of same-sex marriage is not only controversial but also highly emotive, particularly within the African context. On the one hand, it raises both religious and traditional undertones.
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In Search of Alternative Standards for the Adjudication of Socioeconomic Rights
—Carlos Bernal, Senior Lecturer, Macquarie University Socioeconomic rights are one of the greatest innovations of contemporary constitutionalism, in particular, of developing countries. Some of their constitutions address the issues of poverty, unsatisfied basic needs, lack of resources for the exercise of freedoms and political rights, and unequal distribution of opportunities and wealth, by means of…
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The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Hong Kong Jurisprudence
– Simon NM Young, University of Hong Kong In my current research, I am trying to understand the influence of the Canadian Charter in Hong Kong’s development of human rights jurisprudence after returning to China in 1997. The prospects for migration were strong, though not because constitutional text had been transplanted.
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Local Injustice: Why We Shouldn’t Forget about Saif Gaddafi
—Ruti Teitel, 2012-13 Straus fellow at NYU School of Law, Ernst C. Stiefel Professor of Comparative Law at New York Law School, and author of Transitional Justice (OUP 2000) and Humanity’s Law (OUP 2012). In the London newspaper the Daily Mail, Saif Gaddafi’s longtime girlfriend, Orly Weinerman, has asked that Saif be spared prosecution…
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A Review of Iceland’s Draft Constitution from the Comparative Constitutions Project
–Zachary Elkins, University of Texas; Tom Ginsburg,University of Chicago; James Melton,University College London On the heels of an extraordinarily interesting experiment in constitutional design by crowdsourcing, Iceland is headed to the polls this week to test the public’s reaction to the draft constitution.