In an earlier article, some years before the Brexit Referendum, I examined the current ‘architecture‘ of the British state, in particular the way in which governmental power was distributed among the nations of the United Kingdom. The theme of this chapter was to show how the continuing (and, as James Bryce argued, inevitable) tension between...
Bringing Rigour to Fundamental Rights and Principles Reasoning
In the United Kingdom, fundamental rights and fundamental principles reasoning creates tensions on the frontier between law and politics, particularly between parliamentary legislation and judicial interpretation of statutes. As Lord Hoffman said in Simms ‘[f]undamental rights cannot be overridden by general or ambiguous words’ of a statute’. The problem is that aiming to interpret ‘general...
Challenges to the rule of law in a semi-authoritarian Hong Kong
Hong Kong has been recognized for its well established rule of law. After the Umbrella Movement in 2014, the Chinese Communist regime adjusted its strategy towards Hong Kong and closed the road to democracy. With the end of the era of semi-democracy, the governing system in Hong Kong is now going in an authoritarian direction....
Challenging Eminent Domain in the High People‘s Courts: Procedure is the Key!
This paper investigates empirically how Chinese courts adjudicate eminent domain decisions for the first time and proves that even the non-independent Chinese courts can curb local governments‘ eminent domain power to some extent. We hand-coded 586 eminent domain judgements awarded by the High People‘s Courts of China from 2014-2015, which were made available by the...
Change of the Mandatary Retirement Age Based on the Constitutional Equal Protection
Different standards for the elderly from the other ages are adopted for the termination of employment contract in Korean workplaces. Labor laws stipulate a mandatory retirement age to protect employees. However, many employees are laid off in spite of legal regulations. External factors should be considered for deciding the existence of age discrimination at work....
China As A Champion of An Illiberal Rule of Law
As part of its ‘reform and opening up policy‘ initiated in 1978, the PRC started building a new legal system, modelled to a great extent after Western examples. In 1982, it adopted a new constitution, which has remained mostly the same with some amendments. While alternating between the creation of a true ‘rule of law‘...
China‘s contemporary dual state and its global implications
After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the Chinese Party-State initiated a legal revival that raised many hopes of an eventual transition to rule of law, conceived in terms of a global constitutional model. In recent years, however, the leadership has increasingly rejected the values underpinning rule of law and relied on controlling society...
Choice and fraud: Conceptualizing and operationalizing identity by public law
The paper investigates the role of public law in identity politics, identifying potential angles to the scrutiny, such as (i) whether are there are existing legal definitions for the “source“ of identity; (ii) whether the definitions concern the majority community (or communities), or only minorities, and whether there are illuminative differences; (iii) how membership criteria...
Commentary on the book
The commentator will discuss Parliament’s Secret War inquiry of the constitutional convention, which is celebrated as representing a redistribution of power from the executive towards a more legitimate, democratic institution. It will address a number of persistent problems revealed by the book, including Parliament’s lack of access to relevant information, government ‘legalisation’ of parliamentary debates...
Common Legal Drafting Rules for the Portuguese-speaking countries and regions: identification of the existing situation
This paper is aimed at presenting the status of legislative drafting rules, standards and guidelines in Portuguese speaking countries and regions where more than 250 million people reside. Those standards are set forth in a collection of laws and guidelines which vary in its form, its legal value (hard or soft law) and scope from...