Download or read book Abusive Constitutional Borrowing written by Rosalind Dixon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Law is fast globalizing as a field, and many lawyers, judges and political leaders are engaged in a process of comparative borrowing. But this new form of legal globalization has darksides: it is not just a source of inspiration for those seeking to strengthen and improve democratic institutions and policies. It is increasingly an inspiration - and legitimation device - for those seeking to erode democracy by stealth, under the guise of a form of faux liberal democratic cover. Abusive Constitutional Borrowing: Legal globalization and the subversion of liberal democracy outlines this phenomenon, how it succeeds, and what we can do to prevent it. This book address current patterns of democratic retrenchment and explores its multiple variants and technologies, considering the role of legitimating ideologies that help support different modes of abusive constitutionalism. An important contribution to both legal and political scholarship, this book will of interest to all those working in the legal and political disciplines of public law, constitutional theory, political theory, and political science.

Download or read book Abusive Constitutional Borrowing written by Rosalind Dixon and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Law is fast globalizing as a field, and many lawyers, judges and political leaders are engaged in a process of comparative "borrowing". But this new form of legal globalization has darksides: it is not just a source of inspiration for those seeking to strengthen and improve democratic institutions and policies. It is increasingly an inspiration - and legitimation device - for those seeking to erode democracy by stealth, under the guise of a form of faux liberal democratic cover. Abusive Constitutional Borrowing: Legal globalization and the subversion of liberal democracy outlines this phenomenon, how it succeeds, and what we can do to prevent it. This book address current patterns of democratic retrenchment and explores its multiple variants and technologies, considering the role of legitimating ideologies that help support different modes of abusive constitutionalism. An important contribution to both legal and political scholarship, this book will of interest to all those working in the legal and political disciplines of public law, constitutional theory, political theory, and political science."--

Download or read book Comparative Constitutional Law written by Tom Ginsburg and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 681 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This landmark volume of specially commissioned, original contributions by top international scholars organizes the issues and controversies of the rich and rapidly maturing field of comparative constitutional law. Divided into sections on constitutional design and redesign, identity, structure, individual rights and state duties, courts and constitutional interpretation, this comprehensive volume covers over 100 countries as well as a range of approaches to the boundaries of constitutional law. While some chapters reference the text of legal instruments expressly labeled constitutional, others focus on the idea of entrenchment or take a more functional approach. Challenging the current boundaries of the field, the contributors offer diverse perspectives - cultural, historical and institutional - as well as suggestions for future research. A unique and enlightening volume, Comparative Constitutional Law is an essential resource for students and scholars of the subject.

Download or read book The Retreat of Liberal Democracy written by Gábor Scheiring and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-26 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the product of three years of empirical research, four years in politics, and a lifetime in a country experiencing three different regimes. Transcending disciplinary boundaries, it provides a fresh answer to a simple yet profound question: why has liberal democracy retreated? Scheiring argues that Hungary’s new hybrid authoritarian regime emerged as a political response to the tensions of globalisation. He demonstrates how Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz exploited the rising nationalism among the working-class casualties of deindustrialisation and the national bourgeoisie to consolidate illiberal hegemony. As the world faces a new wave of autocratisation, Hungary’s lessons become relevant across the globe, and this book represents a significant contribution to understanding challenges to democracy. This work will be useful to students and researchers across political sociology, political science, economics and social anthropology, as well democracy advocates.

Download or read book Poland s Constitutional Breakdown written by Wojciech Sadurski and published by Oxford Comparative Constitutio. This book was released on 2019-05-16 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since 2015, Poland's populist Law and Justice Party (PiS) has been dismantling the major checks and balances of the Polish state and subordinating the courts, the civil service, and the media to the will of the executive. Political rights have been radically restricted, and the Party has captured the entire state apparatus. The speed and depth of these antidemocratic movements took many observers by surprise: until now, Poland was widely regarded as an example of a successful transitional democracy. Poland's anti-constitutional breakdown poses three questions that this book sets out to answer: What, exactly, has happened since 2015? Why did it happen? And what are the prospects for a return to liberal democracy? These answers are formulated against a backdrop of current worldwide trends towards populism, authoritarianism, and what is sometimes called 'illiberal democracy'. As this book argues, the Polish variant of 'illiberal democracy' is an oxymoron. By undermining the separation of powers, the PiS concentrates all power in its own hands, rendering any democratic accountability illusory. There is, however, no inevitability in these anti-democratic trends: this book considers a number of possible remedies and sources of hope, including intervention by the European Union.

Download or read book Power to the People written by Mark Tushnet and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-22 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Self-described populist leaders around the world are dismantling their nation's constitutions. This has led to a widespread view that populism as such is inconsistent with constitutionalism. This book proposes that some forms of populism are inconsistent with constitutionalism, while others aren't. Context and detail matter. Power to the People offers a thin definition of constitutionalism that people from the progressive left to the conservative right should be able to agree on even if they would supplement the thin definition within other more partisan ideas. This is followed by a similarly basic definition of populism. Comparing the two, this book argues that one facet of populism -its suspicion of institutions that are strongly entrenched against change by political majorities-is sometimes inconsistent with constitutionalism's thinly understood definition. The book provides a series of case studies, some organized by nation, others by topic, to identify, more precisely, when and how populist programs are inconsistent with constitutionalism-and, importantly, when and how they are not. Concluding with a discussion of the possibilities for a deeper, populist democracy, the book examines recent challenges to the idea that democracy is a good form of government by exploring possibilities for new, albeit revisable, institutions that can determine and implement a majority's views without always threatening constitutionalism.

Download or read book Eternity Clauses in Democratic Constitutionalism written by Silvia Suteu and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-05-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses unamendability in democratic constitutionalism and engages critically and systematically with its perils, offering a much-needed corrective to existing understandings of this phenomenon. Whether formalized in the constitutional text or developed as part of judicial doctrines of implicit unamendability, eternity clauses raise fundamental questions about the core democratic commitments underpinning any given constitution. The book takes seriously the democratic challenge eternity clauses pose and argues that this goes beyond the old tension between constitutionalism and democracy. Instead, eternity clauses reveal themselves to be a far more ambivalent constitutional mechanism, one with greater and more insidious potential for abuse than has been recognized. The 'dark side' of unamendability includes its propensity to insulate majoritarian, exclusionary, and internally incoherent values, as well as its sometimes purely pragmatic role in elite bargaining. The book adopts a contextual approach and brings to the fore a variety of case studies from non-traditional jurisdictions. These insights from the periphery illuminate the prospects of unamendability fulfilling its intended aims - protecting constitutional democracy foremost among them. With its promise most appealing in transitional, post-conflict, and fragile democracies, unamendability reveals itself, counterintuitively, to be both less potent and potentially more dangerous in precisely these contexts. The book also places the rise of eternity clauses in the context of other significant trends in recent constitutional practice: the transnational embeddedness of constitution-making and of constitutional adjudication; the rise of popular participation in constitutional reform processes; and the ongoing crisis of democratic backsliding in liberal democracies.

Download or read book Scales of Memory written by Justin Collings and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-01-05 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the Second World War, constitutional justice has spread through much of the democratic world. Often it has followed in the wake of national calamity and historical evil - whether fascism or communism, colonialism or apartheid. Unsurprisingly, the memory of such evils plays a prominent role in constitutional adjudication. This book explores the relationship between constitutional interpretation and the memory of historical evil. Specifically, it examines how the constitutional courts of the United States, Germany, and South Africa have grappled, respectively, with the legacies of slavery, Nazism, and apartheid. Most courts invoke historical evil through either the parenthetical or the redemptive mode of constitutional memory. The parenthetical framework views the evil era as exceptional - a baleful aberration from an otherwise noble and worthy constitutional tradition. Parenthetical jurisprudence reaches beyond the evil era toward stable and enduring values. It sees the constitutional response to evil as restorative rather than revolutionary - a return to and reaffirmation of older traditions. The redemptive mode, by contrast, is more aggressive. Its aim is not to resume a venerable tradition but to reverse recent ills. Its animating spirit is not restoration, but antithesis. Its aim is not continuity with deeper pasts, but a redemptive future stemming from a stark, complete, and vivid rupture. This book demonstrates how, across the three jurisdictions, the parenthetical mode has often accompanied formalist and originalist approaches to constitutional interpretation, whereas the redemptive mode has accompanied realist and purposive approaches. It also shows how, within the three jurisdictions, the parenthetical mode of memory has consistently predominated in American constitutional jurisprudence; the redemptive mode in South African jurisprudence; and a hybrid, parenthetical-redemptive mode in German constitutional jurisprudence. The real-world consequences of these trends have been stark and dramatic. Memory matters, especially in constitutional interpretation.

Download or read book We the Women written by Julie C. Suk and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-08-11 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ruth Bader Ginsburg believed that the equal rights of women belonged in the Constitution. She stood on the shoulders of brilliant women who persisted across generations to change the Constitution. We the Women tells their stories, showing what’s at stake in the current battle for the Equal Rights Amendment. The year 2020 marks the centennial the Nineteenth Amendment, guaranteeing women’s constitutional right to vote. But have we come far enough? After passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, revolutionary women demanded full equality beyond suffrage, by proposing the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Congress took almost fifty years to adopt it in 1972, and the states took almost as long to ratify it. In January 2020, Virginia became the final state needed to ratify the amendment. Why did the ERA take so long? Is it too late to add it to the Constitution? And what could it do for women? A leading legal scholar tells the story of the ERA through the voices of the bold women lawmakers who created it. They faced opposition and subterfuge at every turn, but they kept the ERA alive. And, despite significant victories by women lawyers like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the achievements of gender equality have fallen short, especially for working mothers and women of color. Julie Suk excavates the ERA’s past to guide its future, explaining how the ERA can address hot-button issues such as pregnancy discrimination, sexual harassment, and unequal pay. The rise of movements like the Women’s March and #MeToo have ignited women across the country. Unstoppable women are winning elections, challenging male abuses of power, and changing the law to support working families. Can they add the ERA to the Constitution and improve American democracy? We the Women shows how the founding mothers of the ERA and the forgotten mothers of all our children have transformed our living Constitution for the better.

Download or read book The Failure of Popular Constitution Making in Turkey written by Felix Petersen and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-16 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offers an in-depth case study of the failure of popular constitution making in Turkey from 2011 to 2013.

Download or read book Comparative Constitutional Law in Latin America written by Rosalind Dixon and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2017-06-30 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides unique insights into the practice of democratic constitutionalism in one of the world’s most legally and politically significant regions. It combines contributions from leading Latin American and global scholars to provide ‘bottom up’ and ‘top down’ insights about the lessons to be drawn from the distinctive constitutional experiences of countries in Latin America. In doing so, it also draws on a rich array of legal and interdisciplinary perspectives. Ultimately, it shows both the promise of democratic constitutions as a vehicle for social, economic and political change, and the variation in the actual constitutional experiences of different countries on the ground – or the limits to constitutions as a locus for broader social change.

Download or read book Outsourcing Rulemaking Powers written by Cedric Jenart and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Outsourcing Rulemaking Powers identifies the shared constitutional principles that determine the limits to the outsourcing of rulemaking powers. Through the examination of multiple countries, this book argues that there should be minimal legal safeguards to which all rules must heed, in particular those made by autonomous public or private actors.

Download or read book Constitutional Democracy in Crisis written by Mark A. Graber and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-23 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is the world facing a serious threat to the protection of constitutional democracy? There is a genuine debate about the meaning of the various political events that have, for many scholars and observers, generated a feeling of deep foreboding about our collective futures all over the world. Do these events represent simply the normal ebb and flow of political possibilities, or do they instead portend a more permanent move away from constitutional democracy that had been thought triumphant after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1989? Constitutional Democracy in Crisis? addresses these questions head-on: Are the forces weakening constitutional democracy around the world general or nation-specific? Why have some major democracies seemingly not experienced these problems? How can we as scholars and citizens think clearly about the ideas of "constitutional crisis" or "constitutional degeneration"? What are the impacts of forces such as globalization, immigration, income inequality, populism, nationalism, religious sectarianism? Bringing together leading scholars to engage critically with the crises facing constitutional democracies in the 21st century, these essays diagnose the causes of the present afflictions in regimes, regions, and across the globe, believing at this stage that diagnosis is of central importance - as Abraham Lincoln said in his "House Divided" speech, "If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do, and how to do it."

Download or read book Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments written by Yaniv Roznai and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can constitutional amendments be unconstitutional? Using theoretical and comparative approaches, Roznai establishes the nature and scope of constitutional amendment powers by focusing on substantive limitations, looking at their prevalence in practice and the conceptual coherence of the very idea of limitations to constitutional amendment powers.

Download or read book Judges in Contemporary Democracy written by Justice Stephen Breyer and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2004-06-01 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Law, politics, and society in the modern West have been marked by the increasing power of the judge: the development of constitutional justice, the evolution of international judiciaries, and judicial systems that extend even further into social life. Judges make decisions that not only enforce the law, but also codify the values of our times. In the summer of 2000, an esteemed group of judges and legal scholars met in Provence, France, to consider the role of the judge in modern society. They included Robert Badinter, former president of the Constitutional Council in France; Stephen Breyer, Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States; Antonio Cassese, the first president of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia; Dieter Grimm, former vice president of the Constitutional Court of Germany; Gil Carlos Rodriguez, president of the Court of Justice of the European Union; and Ronald Dworkin, formerly of Oxford University, now professor of philosophy and law at the New York University Law School. What followed was an animated discussion ranging from the influence of the media on the judiciary to the development of an international criminal law to the judge's consideration of the judge's own role. Judges in Contemporary Democracy offers a rare and intimate glimpse into the powers and the role of judges in today's society.

Download or read book Populist Challenges to Constitutional Interpretation in Europe and Beyond written by Fruzsina Gárdos-Orosz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-03 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the relationship between populism or populist regimes and constitutional interpretation used in those regimes. The volume discusses the question of whether contemporary populist governments and movements have developed, or encouraged new and specific constitutional theories, doctrines and methods of interpretation, or whether their constitutional and other high courts continue to use the old, traditional interpretative tools in constitutional adjudication. The book is divided into four parts. Part I contains three chapters elaborating the theoretical basis for the discussion. Part II examines the topic from a comparative perspective, representing those European countries where populism is most prevalent, including Austria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Part III extends the focus to the United States, reflecting how American jurisprudence and academia have produced the most important contributions to the theory of constitutional interpretation, and how recent political developments in that country might challenge the traditional understanding of judicial review. This section also includes a general overview on Latin America, where there are also some populist governments and strong populist movements. Finally, the editors’ closing study analyses the outcomes of the comparative research, summarizing the conclusions of the book. Written by renowned national constitutional scholars, the book will be essential reading for students, academics and researchers working in Constitutional Law and Politics. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Download or read book Public Law written by Mark Elliott and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2011-03-17 with total page 902 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public Law is a high quality introductory textbook that comprehensively covers the key topics found on undergraduate public law courses. Three key themes that permeate all of the content allow students to approach the content in a structured and easy to understand way and questions posed throughout the chapters give students the opportunity to provide answers that show how their knowledge has increased as the chapter progresses. The key themes are: -The significance of executive power in the contemporary constitution and the challenge of ensuring that those who wield it are held to account -The shift in recent times from a more political to a more legal constitution and the implications of this change -The increasingly 'multi-layered' character of the British constitution Online Resource Centre Public Law is accompanied by a free, open-access Online Resource Centre (www.oxfordtextbooks.co.uk/orc/elliott_thomas) which offers the following resources to support students: - Figures from the book reproduced online - A list of useful websites for students - Regularly posted legal and political updates for the book - A testbank of questions for tutors to assess students' progress This book has been highly endorsed by lecturers for level of coverage, accuracy, and the manner in which the three themes provide an excellent backdrop to the book's content. 'I think it will be a very welcome addition to the range of text books available and I suspect that it will become my personal favourite.' - Barbara Mauthe; Lancaster University 'I found the book impressive and likely to be of interest and use to a great many. It is written in a style that is pitched about the right level. It was easy to understand and provides - for me - a good blend of black letter law and socio-political context' - David Mead; University of East Anglia Written by two experienced teachers of the subject, Public Law is an essential new text that focuses on what students need to engage with and understand this challenging subject.