The decline of sovereignty in a globalised post-sovereignty era is much spoken of but the term has both external and internal dimensions. If what is required is a new constitutional dynamic in which the claims of popular sovereignty require a reframing of constitutional thinking, the question then is what might or could be the normative...
A Dialogic Approach to the Place of Judges in Democracy
El siguiente trabajo se propone contrastar ciertas visiones que sostienen que los jueces deben mantener una posición aislada frente a la sociedad y las restantes ramas de gobierno, con una propuesta dialógica según la cual la interacción deliberativa es deseable, en la medida que contribuye a dotar de imparcialidad las decisiones públicas. A fin de...
Changing Ideas of Representation: Representative Democracy, and the Rule of Law in Singapore
This paper examines recent pronouncements, both in and outside of courts, concerning the nature of representative democracy and how it relates to the rule of law in Singapore. Given that conceptions of the rule of law are theorized to require the incorporation of democracy into the legal system, this article examines the implications of recent...
Data and fundamental rights
This presentation provides an overview of the relationship between data and fundamental rights at the current point in time, and directions as to where and how this relationship might continue. At the basis of this relationship are the fundamental rights to privacy and free expression; however with the digital society being more pervasive, other fundamental...
Democratization by international organizations: EU and Romania
In one of his most famous books (Third Wave, 1991), Samuel P. Huntington compares Romania and Sudan in terms of negative perspectives of democratization linked to similar domestic factors. As history has later shown, however, different external influences have led Romania to become a democracy and Sudan to be still an authoritarian regime that has...
Each Conscience A Law Unto Itself? Religious Accommodation in the U.S. and Germany
This paper compares the US Supreme Court‘s and the German Constitutional Court‘s approaches to religious accommodation. The US Court does not usually require the state to accommodate people through religious exemptions. I argue that Scalia‘s critical view of accommodations followed from the political philosophy of Locke that was especially influential at the time of the...
Economic and Social Rights in Asia
Socio-economic rights have been increasingly recognized in constitutions and jurisprudence across the world. South-East Asia represents, however, a partial outlier in this development. The region is only outmatched by the Arab States in its reluctance to recognize socio-economic rights. For core rights pertaining to the workplace, it is the most conservative region in the world....
Governing By Chief Executives
Despite claims about the “hollowing-out“ of the state, governments worldwide are still focused on policymaking through various bureaucratic structures. But who controls this apparatus? In the US, the common response is that the president possesses most levers of control over the administrative state. In this paper, I argue that similar reality exists in parliamentary systems...
Informed Consent Rule in Suborbital Flights: in the context of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR)
Informed consent rule concerning the commercial space activities, especially suborbital flights, was firstly introduced in the US CSLAA 2004. It works on the basis of temporary licensing regime, thus establishing the operators the “duty to warn“ and releasing the operators from liability of accidents due to inherent risks. The informed consent rule also boosted the...