In constitutional law, situations of public emergency (PE) relate mostly to war, terrorism, civil unrest and natural disasters of large scale; little attention has been given so far to other phenomena. Despite the fact that migrations historically form a part of human identity, attitudes towards them changed drastically in the last decades, especially in the...
Megapolitical Cases and the Constitutional Court of Indonesia: An Empirical Analysis (2003-2017)
Indonesia’s Constitutional Court is considered as one of Asia’s most activist courts. In this paper we investigate empirically the determinants of judicial behaviour at the Constitutional Court of Indonesia in the period 2003-2017. The paper draws on a unique data set of 80 high profile political cases complemented by data on the socio-biographic profiles of...
Legal pluralism: a means of sustaining liberal constitutionalism within authoritarianism? The case of China and Hong Kong
In this paper, legal pluralism is defined as the existence of conflicting rules within a legal system on an institution‘s legal power, with no other institution possessing the legal power to resolve that conflict. An example of such pluralism is found in the interaction between European law and member state law: the ECJ claims that...
Lawmaking in 21st Century Canada: Executive Power and the Search for Accountability
Canada prides itself as an exemplar of democracy and the rule of law. It has constitutionally entrenched fundamental rights and freedoms and scores highly on studies assessing the quality of its legal system. Yet its clean bill of health and sterling reputation abroad masks the less positive reality of lawmaking in 21st century Canada. Most...
Legal interactions in the global governance of international finance
The article provides a theoretically grounded analysis of selected instances of legal interactions between bodies of norms emanating from formal and informal sources of regulatory authority in the issue area of global financial regulation. It discusses such interactions by looking at examples from global financial and accounting standards, credit rating agencies, banking and derivatives market...
Justifying the Culture of Justification
The ideas of the culture of justification – according to which it is the role of the courts to ensure that every act of the state that affects a person is substantively justifiable – and the related right to justification – which claims that every person possesses a moral and, ideally, constitutional right to the...
Judicial Review of Constitutional Amendments: Taiwan
Major differences in the finality and impact of judicial review from country to country have led scholars to distinguish between “hard“ and “soft“ forms of judicial review. However, hard review does not give courts the last word: even in systems of nominally hard review, the government usually retains the ability to effectively override the courts...
Judicial responses to crises measures: A post-crisis assessment
This paper analyses the judiciary‘s responses to the measures imposed in addressing the adverse effects of the financial and sovereign debt crisis. It examines the jurisprudence of national courts, the Court of Justice of the EU, the European Court of Human Rights as well as awards of international arbitration tribunals that were set up under...
Judicial Independence in Hong Kong from a Hybrid Regime Perspective
Studies on judicial politics in democracies have found that electoral competition is an important factor contributing to de facto judicial independence. There has been, however, limited research on the relationship between electoral politics and judicial independence in non-democracies, mainly because it is assumed that elections in non-democracies are shams. The literature has largely overlooked the...
On the Legal Implications of a ‘Permanent‘ Constituent Power
A number of Mexican constitutional scholars have insisted, since the early 20th century, in the ephemeral nature of the original constituent power. However, they also maintain that once the original constituent power is exhausted, a permanent constituent power emerges. According to them, in the Constitution of 1917, that permanent constituent power is located in a...