The paper analyzes political resistance as an aesthetic phenomenon by taking as an example a protest in which two asylum seekers stabbed themselves in front of the Finnish Parliament House in the autumn 2017. An aesthetic reading of refugee activism allows critical insights into paradoxes of politics, identity and rights in the western juridico-political context....
Re-constituting Global Cyber-Law
At least since the early 1990s there has been a spirited ‘cyberlaw‘ debate, which led to important insights about governance, regulation, and law in the digital era. But existing cyberlaw scholarship neglects, somewhat curiously, the Internet‘s inherently global aspiration and the corresponding need to develop legal mechanisms to keep key institutions of global internet governance...
Reflecting Modern Realities: From Implied Powers to Implied Obligations
The General rules of interpretation contained in Article 31 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties do not only apply to treaties; they also apply to the constitutions of International Organizations. This paper argues that a textual application of the VCLT that interprets an IO‘s constitution “in good faith in accordance with the...
Quantitative Measures of Equal Rights in Constitutions: Methods and Key Findings
Quantitative measures of constitutional rights enable rapid comparisons of the quality of rights across countries for different aspects of identity. We have constructed an original database of 50 specific civil, political, social, economic, and equal constitutional rights across 14 aspects of identity for 193 countries. We find that fewer constitutions guarantee equal rights for persons...
Receive it to believe it? Administrative information-sharing under European constitutional law
In almost every conceivable sector of Europe’s composite administration, information is gathered and passed on between different national authorities amongst themselves, or between national and EU ad-ministration. This is particularly true of Europe’s Area of Freedom, Security and Justice, and of the interoperable information systems that it has put in place. The EU constitutional framing...
Rights Advocacy through Simulation
As a fledgling civic institution in Taiwan, the Constitutional Court Simulation(CCS)has received much attention and interest from the Taiwan Constitutional Court as well as the general public in the recent years by tackling such salient issues as same-sex marriage, death penalty, and transitional justice. This essay analyzes, explains and assesses the workings of the CCS...
Rule by Data and the Quest for Data Justice: Lessons from China‘s Social Credit
Big data brings promises and perils. The US and EU have formulated various legal responses attempting to weed out the harm of big data analytics but harvest its benefits. The current legal concerns are largely on the harm of profiling, discrimination and misuse of personal data. This framework hinges on the identification of clear cases...
Revisiting the Constitutional Override: Turning a “Bete Noir“ Into a Useful Constitutional Tool
The Canadian “Notwithstanding“ or “override“ has enjoyed significant scholarly discussion and some name caling: from the “bête noire of Canadian constitutional politics“ to “poison pill“ (CJ Barak in Israel). While in Canada the override preserves the provinces / federation balance, in Israel the override is purely a matter of the last word in judicial review:...
Rethinking Democracy in the Context of Globalization
Globalization, the process of increasing interdependence around the world, has massively transformed patterns of legal and political order from the mostly clear-cut divisions between international and national systems to the ever more overlapping coexistence of various governance arrangements at different levels. This ongoing transformation is creating problems for democracy. On the one hand, many international...