Peace agreements concluded after internal armed conflicts often stipulate radical constitutional change. When this is envisioned to take place within an existing constitution, it creates normativity clashes between the constitution and the peace agreement by circumventing constitutional amendment procedures or conflicting with the unamendable constitutional principles. This paper sets out the manifestations of such clashes...
A Square, a Museum and a Monument: Piazza Venezia in Rome after World War II
Piazza Venezia in Rome has been heavily characterized by its connection to the Italian Fascist Regime. First the Venetian and Austrian embassy, then Benito Mussolini‘s headquarters, Palazzo Venezia represents the incarnation of the Fascist Regime in the Italian cultural memory. Despite being the headquarters of the Italian Prime Minister during the 1920s and 1930s, Palazzo...
Abortion and Federalism in Mexico: Assessing a Decade of Constitutional Litigation
An element that singularizes the Mexican constitutional debate on abortion in the Latin American scenario is no doubt federalism, since the Supreme Court decided in 2008 that abortion was to be adjudicated under this frame, and not under a fundamental rights frame. While this approach has been criticized for its minimalism, and for generating a...
Administrative law at the crossroad between domestic safety and human rights
The paper aims to analyze from a comparative perspective the double role played by administrative law rules and institutions to ensure domestic safety and to provide basic guarantees for human rights
Administrative means of review of European Supervisory Authorities and ECB decisions: a comparative analysis
The paper analyses the administrative means of review, which can be sought against decisions made by the European Supervisory Authorities (before the Joint Board of Appeal) and by the European Central Bank (before the Administrative Board of Review), in the light of the challenges posed by the completion of the Monetary Union and the forthcoming...
All the world‘s a stage (of popular sovereignty): Catalan referendum between the script, performance, and calculus
In their selective iconoclasm, those who have moved beyond a sovereign people have also neglected the unwritten scripts of constitutional change that accompany the vocabulary of popular sovereignty. Those are the scripts that Catalan sovereigntists, to their disappointment, tried to perform in an attempt to impress relevant spectators—the external actors for whom they believed had...
An Agent-Based Model of Judicial Strategy
Comparative scholarship in constitutional law and political science suggests that the power of courts to exercise judicial review depends partly on the judges’ strategic behaviour; judges can build this power only if they are mindful of how other actors are likely to react to their decisions. Arguably, compliance is the most immediate measure of judicial power. An assertive court is not much good to anyone...
Artificial Intelligence: Challenging the Law
Contemporary legal systems are insufficiently equipped to cope with potential issues arising from developments in AI. Systems using AI are becoming more autonomous in a sense of complexity of tasks they perform, their potential influence on the world and decreasing ability of humans to understand, predict or control their functioning. The functioning of autonomous agents,...
Assuming Facts as an Alternative to Secret Evidence
The UK Investigatory Powers Tribunal, the court responsible for determining human rights claims with regards to state surveillance, has developed procedure which serves to reduce the reliance on secret evidence in a case. Rather than establishing security-sensitive facts regarding the UK’s surveillance regime in closed proceedings, the procedure involves assuming certain facts regarding the nature...
Brexit and the shifting future of the subjects and objects of EU law
The paper purports to observe the consequences of Brexit developing the recent book project framework, ‘Framing the subjects and objects of EU law’, looking beyond the traditional understanding of legal subjectivity. The paper observes the Member State as – on the one hand – the par excellence subject of EU law, and – on the...