It is widely accepted today that the global order contains a multiplicity of different normative orders. While the legal status of some of these normativities – especially those of an informal character and private origin – is still debated, the importance of multiplicity for understanding and theorizing law beyond the state is hardly disputed. Yet...
EU Anticipatory Border Governance in the Age of Interoperability. A Legal Appraisal of the New ‘Flexiciency’ Paradigm
Within the European Agenda on Security, interoperability has passed from being a management concept to an encompassing policy goal, achieved through integration of sensor networks with IT databases. This move may trigger a huge impact on the economics of border protection, particularly in the context of maritime surveillance. This paper deals with the opportunities and...
External Assistance and the Endogenous Forces and Mechanisms of Constitution Making
How does external assistance interact with the endogenous forces and mechanisms of constitution making? This paper unpacks external assistance into different forms, and applies each to the framework of drivers of constitutional design choice developed by Jon Elster in his 1995 paper ‘Forces and Mechanisms of Constitution Making’.
Federalism and the Rights Revolution: Why Do Chinese Local Governments both Endanger and Expand Individual Land Rights?
Local governments in China are resisting and distorting the rights revolution in national law, at the core of which lies the imposition of constraints on those governments‘ eminent domain power. Meanwhile, facing national legislative gridlock, local governments experiment with such initiatives as granting farmers land development rights. Why are Chinese local governments simultaneously endangering the...
Feminism and Family Leave
This Essay explores the dynamics between parental leave policies and the enforcement of legal equality in the United States and other jurisdictions. In so doing, it clarifies and redefines a feminist jurisprudence of family leave. A feminist approach to family leave should advance a substantive vision of gender equality, ‘a more egalitarian relationship at home...
Foundations of Majority Rule and its Application to Constitutional Courts
One of the most salient features of many constitutional democracies is the existence of constitutional courts that can control the constitutionality of statutory legislation. In order to decide whether to invalidate statutory provisions as unconstitutional, most constitutional courts use majority rule. In this paper, I argue that the main justifications provided for majority rule as...
Freedom of the Press vs. Freedom of the Screen: Democratic and Constitutional Challenges of Media Law and Policy in The 21st Century
This article suggests a multi-disciplinary framework for evaluating the political and constitutional legitimacy of both traditional and new media (such as Netflix, YouTube), and explores the double function of public law: supervising the media (television, Netflix or Youtube) and their regulators. By turning to insights from political theory and social sciences, the article argues that...
From Gender Recognition to Transgender Discrimination – Addressing Essentialism and Assimilationism in the Law
How should official documents record the sex/gender of transgender people? Should transgender women be able to access female bathrooms? In the United Kingdom and the European Court of Human Rights, the law has often dealt with such issues through the lens of “gender recognition“, that is, on what criteria should the law recognise the gender...
From Paris with Love: A Critique of President Macron‘s Democratic Conventions
This paper analyses President Macron‘s initiative to hold EU-wide democratic conventions in the run-up to the 2019 EP elections as a method of reviving citizen participation in shaping European integration. The analysis scrutinises the benefits and pitfalls of this initiative and develops a threefold argument. First, while the initiative correctly concentrates on bottom-up democratisation, it...
Geographical Indication as National Identity
The identity of a nation can be determined from many things, one of them through geographical indication. Geographical indication is a sign indicating the origin of an item and / or product. As part of intellectual property rights, geographical indications can also be interpreted as the identity of a nation because the determining factors of...