The new media and communication technologies have significantly increased the number of online cross-border disputes between individuals and businesses involving the security and protection of personal identity and intellectual creations. The digital era challenges the traditional methods of coordination between States, based on geographical localization, revealing a substantial gap in Internet governance world-wide, which leads...
The Promise and Perils of Foreign Judges on Constitutional Courts
Several divided societies have reserved places for foreign judges on their constitutional courts. Drawing on quantitative evidence and elite interviews from Bosnia-Herzegovina, this paper considers both the intended and unintended consequences of this practice. First, the paper considers if a coherent theory for the practice can be gleaned from either constitutional structure and/or the subjective...
A Case Study of the Carabinieri Force for the Protection of Cultural Heritage
In 1969 Italy became the first nation to found a special police force unit, the Carabinieri Force for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, dedicated to combatting the theft and illegal excavation of archaeological sites, the trafficking and counterfeiting of stolen goods, including cultural property, and to ensuring the confiscation of stolen or illegally exported cultural...
“Will Democracy Die in Darkness? Calling Autocracy by its Name“
The asserted primacy of norms over rules and institutions raises perhaps the greatest challenge for scholars and practitioners of constitutional design. In the midst of the great crisis facing contemporary democracy, in America and globally, is there nothing that the law can do? In this paper, I suggest that with appropriate constitutional anchors, the courts...
“Your only right is to obey“: Securing Identity in the PRC
The quote in the title comes from a transcript of an interview with Xie Yang, a human rights lawyer in the PRC. ‘Your only right is to obey‘ is the ultimate, and ultimately inhumane, principle of authoritarian rule marking the collapse of obligation into obedience. It sees force making contact with the exposed, unprotected nerve...
A Coup Against Constitutional Democracy: The Case of Hungary
The paper argues that this current Hungarian constitutional system was made possible by FIDESZ‘ anti-pluralist nationalist populism, and commitment to an ‘illiberal state‘. To achieve this aim the populist government misuses the country‘s lack of constitutional culture, and violates the values of constitutional democracy in the name of its own understanding of ‘national constitutional identity‘.
A Japanese Version of U.S. v. Jones? : The Supreme Courts Decisions on GPS Installation on a Vehicle in the U.S. and Japan
This paper examines the two Supreme Courts‘ decisions in the United States and Japan upon installation of a GPS tracking device on a vehicle. In U.S. v. Jones the Supreme Court of the United States in 2012 held that the government‘s attachment of a GPS device to a vehicle constitutes a “search“ under the Fourth...
A Prequel to the Constitutional Review in China: the Rise of “Constitutional Supremacy“ in the Confinement of the NPC System
The Chinese constitutional system is a unique mixture of the NPC regime and the norms of “constitutional supremacy“. The People‘s Republic of China has been a state with “a written constitution“ for decades; however, the idea of some kind of “the review of the consistency with the Constitution of legal documents“ was brought into the...