Work on better law-making and quality of legislation has boomed over the last decade. It is often cast as a gateway to law that better lives up to its very nature of rule-making in a normatively valuable sense, where societal challenges can be meaningfully tackled and goals achieved. There is a growing literature on the...
SECURITY CHALLENGES AND HUNGARY – A EUROPEAN CONTEXT
The panel addresses the question whether the increased presence of various threats to national security and the legal responses has challenged the commonly accepted notions of the rule of law, democracy and human right standards in Europe, and most particularly in Hungary. Recently, problems have called for and resulted in the establishment of different crisis...
EXCLUSIONARY CONSTITUTIONALISM
This panel considers how constitutional symbolism as well as constitutional design can and have been used as tools in nationalist, majoritarian and colonial projects. The panel papers examine a number of vehicles for constitutional inclusion/exclusion: constitutional directives, invocations of the nation in postcolonial constitutions, institutions in settler states, and unamendable provisions reinforcing majoritarian values. The...
THE RULE OF LAW AND NON-DEMOCRATIC REGIMES
To what extent and in what form can the rule of law exist in non‐democratic jurisdictions? This panel explores issues related to these perennial questions from fresh angles. The first two papers expound the nature of the rule of law. Jeff King argues that state regulation is an important element of the rule of law,...
THE STUDY OF THE MATERIAL CONSTITUTION
This panel invites scholars to engage with a relatively neglected idea of 20th century constitutional studies: the material constitution. As an object of constitutional study, this notion has been engaged in a systematic way only by legal institutionalists of the first wave (Heller, Smend, Mortati, Schmitt of the 30s) and, in a different tradition, by...
INFRASTRUCTURES AS REGULATION (INFRAREG): TRANSNATIONAL LEGAL TECHNOLOGIES AND THE ORDERING POWER OF PHYSICAL, INFORMATIONAL, AND DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURES
Infrastructures—whether physical, informational, digital—can have regulatory‐type effects. These include requiring, preventing, channeling, enabling, and nudging particular human and social behavior. Infrastructures also interact or compete with law. In these ways, infrastructures have major effects on social relations, identities, roles, capabilities, and possibilities. In today‘s world, infrastructures‐as‐regulation, and the enabling and controlling legal technologies and practices,...
UNCONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENTS: THEORY AND PRACTICE
The idea that the constitutional amendment power is limited and that amendments can be unconstitutional gains traction by the day. While scholarship attempts to make a theoretical sense of it, the idea continues to migrate across jurisdictions. This panel will discuss the idea of unconstitutional amendments from both theoretical and comparative perspectives. Is the Slovak...
INQUIRING OF JUDICIAL DECISION MAKING
This panel brings together various scholars of law and politics from Europe and United-States whose research in various fields (constitutional law, discrimination law and theory of law). They look at the contemporary outcomes of mechanisms of judicial decision making. As opposed to classical literature on legal reasoning, which is much concerned with legal interpretation, this...