The increase intersection between constitutional law and law philosophy trabsforma the single orientation of each subject. Technically, this approach is not a subject, neither an issue of consideration by philophers. The state of art in constitutional interpretation call for more than a soft knowledge in moral and polical philosophy. Today democratic questions are raised for...
The 2014 Tunisian Constitution: New Constitution, New Constitutional Identity?
In Tunisia, the adoption of the 2014 Constitution was fraught with complications. The role of Islam in the Constitution, with its impact on the scope and recognition of human rights, or the choice of a semi-presidential system were among the key points of contention. Further, Tunisia is no exception to the widespread trend of the...
Shotgun Referendums: Popular Deliberation in Contested Regions
Much deliberative democracy theory examines the capacity of public institutions to promote governance by deliberation instead of bald coercion. Recent works have even examined the prospects for deliberation during an exercise long thought to be paradigmatically anti-deliberative: referendum voting. Tierney, Fishkin, Kildea, and Levy have assessed the possibilities of designing ‘deliberative referendums‘. Yet these past...
To File the World: the Archive as Cultural Heritage and the Power of Remembering
This paper analyses the historic archive as a tool for the preservation of memory. Beyond the idea of the archive as a fixed and immovable space, the paper wishes to consider the archive in its dynamism, chronological evolution, and in its changing relations with both the State and the private individual. Starting from a historical...
(International) Law as Answer to Moral Risk
We argue that the idea of moral risk is necessary to understanding (a) the nature of certain morally significant relationships and their constitutive rights, duties, and responsibilities; and (b) the nature of (international) law and the character of legal rights, duties, and responsibilities. Moral risk is exposure to harmful normative change (normative change being change...
‘Robo-Debt‘: Guilt, Responsibility and the Dehumanisation of Welfare Compliance
This paper explores how digital techniques of policy implementation can themselves propel, shape and/or disrupt processes of welfare reform. It does so via a close analysis of the implementation of the Online Compliance Intervention, popularly known as ‘robo-debt‘, by the Australian Department of Human Services (DHS). As it argues, this automated debt recovery system has...
‘Royal Prerogative: Exploring the conceptual architecture‘
In the second paper, Robert Craig will address a particular conceptual puzzle raised by Miller: the existence or otherwise of the prerogative to withdraw from the EU. He will argue that, even where statute has put the prerogative into abeyance (following De Keyser‘s), the prerogative is best understood, not as having been abolished, but as...
“Constitution-Making and Authoritarianism in Venezuela: The First Time as Tragedy, the Second as Farce
Marx‘s famous phrase holds that history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.“ The phrase seems apt for the two Constituent Assemblies in Venezuela over the past twenty years: Hugo Chavez‘s in 1999 and Nicolas Maduro‘s in 2017. While constitution-making moments are sometimes romanticized as the high point of democratic constitutionalism,...
“Defining and Tracking the Trajectory of Liberal Constitutional Democracy“
We provide some definitional and empirical scaffolding for thinking about whether the Egyptian and Turkish cases are outliers or exemplars of the current state of democracy. This means first considering how “democracy“ should be defined and analyzed. We argue that in thinking about democratic decline, it is most useful to focus on ‘liberal constitutional democracy’‘...