--Anna Su, S.J.D. Candidate, Harvard Law School, A new Framework Agreement between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front was signed with much rejoicing and fanfare last October 15. To be sure, the Framework Agreement is not yet a peace agreement. In fact, a significant chunk of the agreement concerns the formulation of...

--Eoin Carolan, University College Dublin The recent death of a woman from septicaemia following a miscarriage has focused attention on the legal regime regulating the carrying out of abortions within Ireland. Since the Constitution was amended in 1983 to insert a provision recognising the right to life of the unborn, the issue of abortion has...

--Clark B. Lombardi, University of Washington School of Law, and Nathan J. Brown, George Washington University   (Posted originally on foreignpolicy.com) If a student of constitutional texts sat down to read the draft Egyptian constitution from beginning to end, he or she would find much of it familiar -- the language, structure, and institutions would...

[cross-posted from the HuffingtonPost]               As Cairo’s streets fill with protestors after the rushed passage of the new draft Constitution, all eyes are on the confrontation between the newly re-energized opposition and the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood.  Yet, while controversy swirls around the reach of Islam and the...

--Bianca Selejan-Guţan, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Simion Bărnuţiu Faculty of Law On July 29th, 2012, over 8 million Romanian citizens (i.e. over 46% of the electoral records) voted in the referendum organized for the dismissal of the President. More than 87% voted in favor of the dismissal. On August 29th, 2012, some Western powers expressed their satisfaction...

--Adrien K. Wing, Bessie Dutton Murray Professor of Law, University of Iowa College of Law The world was in shock and awe in the winter of 2010 when Tunisia, a small North African country, was able to remove its twenty-three-year leader President Zine El Abedine Ben Ali from power in less than a month—and with...

-- Steven D. Schwinn, Associate Professor of Law, The John Marshall Law School Access to justice is one of the more widely recognized privileges in constitutional law and international human rights today. All of the most progressive and contemporary constitutions and human rights instruments recognize some form of it. The South Africans, the Germans, the...

--Daniel Lansberg-Rodríguez and Tom Ginsburg, University of Chicago Law School [reprinted from www.foreignpolicy.com] Grousing about our arcane and nonsensical Electoral College, and calling publicly for its end, have by now become time-honored election season traditions in the United States. This year, even the Russians, themselves no paragons of functional democracy, have gotten in on the...

--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. Nor does government today mirror to a significant degree the adapted institutional arrangements...

--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. Comparative constitutional law now has much more vigor than it...

--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.  In...

--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. On the other hand, there is Africa that is haunted by its colonial...

--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...

- 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. Canadians were involved in...

—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...

--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.  This draft is a proposed revision of...

--Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez Yesterday a new article of mine came out in Foreign Policy on some of the possible contingencies  for the upcoming Venezuelan Elections. An earlier version of the piece, which the FP editors felt may be a bit too legalistic and technical for their purposes, was just the sort of thing which I suspect...