What are the legal and ethical limits on the state‘s discretion in using financial means to either incentivize or penalize ideologically contentious speech? Throughout the liberal world, state support of private activities—artistic creation, academic inquiry, welfare provision, etc.—invokes disputes as to the legitimacy of conditions imposed upon recipients, that require them to either express support...
Category: <span>Panel Paper</span>
EMERGENCY, LEGALITY AND RESISTANCE IN ASIA
This panel explores relationships between sovereign prerogative, legality and rights in different Asian contexts. Eva Pils and Rawin Leelapatana apply long-standing theorisation about exceptional state power to contemporary politics in China and Thailand respectively. Pils draws on Frankel‘s conception of the “dual state“ to analyse the reversion to arbitrary displays of state power in China....
ICONOCLASM, NATIONAL IDENTITY, CULTURAL HERITAGE AND MONUMENTS
Clashes surrounding the allowance or prohibition of iconoclasm reveal how public law addresses diverse cultural beliefs. Discussions concerning confederate monuments in the United States and the continuing existence of Fascist monuments in Italy have shed light on the different values societies ascribe to the iconology of certain cultural heritage. States’ decisions to own or control...
STRUCTURAL PRINCIPLES FOR PUBLIC INTERNATIONAL LAW
Traditional accounts of the ‘structural’ principles of international law are ‘positivistic‘ and ‘voluntarist‘, suggesting that: a) law and morality are conceptually distinct; and b) no international obligations can exist without state consent. Each paper in this panel challenges these orthodoxies in different ways. Whether by assessing the limits of legitimate democratic rule, the need to...
CONSTITUTIONAL POLITICS IN ASIA
The panel explores contemporary instances in which constitutional law interacts with politics in leading jurisdictions in Southeast Asia. It adopts a dual take as to the meaning of politics. On the one hand, it showcases how courts and other institutions grapple with potentially explosive ‘high politics’ questions that go towards a polity’s self-understanding and the...
CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS? II
The early twenty-first century appears of be a period of turmoil in many seemingly stable constitutional democracies. This panel and two others discuss such questions as these: Are there general forces weakening constitutional democracy around the world, or are there nation-specific reasons for crises that simply happen to be occurring at roughly the same time?...
CHINA‘S “ONE COUNTRY, TWO SYSTEMS“: REFLECTIONS FROM HONG KONG AND MACAU
Hong Kong and Macau are the only two “special administrative regions“ in China- regions that are given a high degree of autonomy and allowed to not practice China‘s Socialist systems. This panel evaluates the nearly 21 years (for Hong Kong) and 18 years (for Macau) of implementing this “One Country, Two Systems“ governing mode and...
INTERNATIONAL NORMS AND CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE IN UNRECEPTIVE ENVIRONMENTS: THE SOUTH EAST ASIAN CONUNDRUM II (CONSTITUTIONALISM AS REGIONAL IMAGINARY)
In South East Asia there is sensitivity to international law intruding on domestic sovereignty; a patchy tradition of constitutional democracy; and the central vehicle for international engagement, ASEAN, largely eschews binding norms. A sister panel explored how ASEAN had reconfigured systems of administration around a model of the investee State. This panel explores the way...
INVESTMENT COURTS: CHALLENGES, PERSPECTIVES AND REGIONAL POLICIES
Suggestions for the creation of permanent investment courts have been formulated for decades, but only recently they started taking actual institutional form. In particular, the European Commission has been pushing for a court-like mechanism for investment disputes in several recent trade negotiations. Such a framework was included in the EU treaties with Vietnam and Canada,...