This paper explores how digital techniques of policy implementation can themselves propel, shape and/or disrupt processes of welfare reform. It does so via a close analysis of the implementation of the Online Compliance Intervention, popularly known as ‘robo-debt‘, by the Australian Department of Human Services (DHS). As it argues, this automated debt recovery system has...
Tag: <span>MONDAY 25 June 2018 16:45-18:15</span>
“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 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...
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...
Abortion regulation in the USA and in Europe: reversed trends?
The paper deals with the issue of abortion law in a comparative perspective. Despite the scientific progress, the regulation of abortion represents an insidious field, which involves extra legal issues, such as the status recognized to the unborn, the freedom of choice of the woman and the right to life of the unborn. Moreover, since...
Administrative Law as a Modest Guardian of the Rule of Law
This paper considers the role of HK courts and common law administrative law principles in combating encroachments on HK‘s rule of law from national security laws. The courts have two main roles. 1) Entrenching a position for themselves in the interpretation of Article 23. 2) Checking and balancing against the executive‘s enforcement and implementation of...
Against Interpretation as an Alternative to Invalidation
This paper’s object is to sound a note of caution against the rise of remedial interpretation (ie a court rewriting a statute to render it compatible with a constitutional norm) as an alternative to statutory invalidation as a remedy for violations of constitutional norms in Anglo-American countries (eg s 3 of the UK Human Rights...
Australian anti-terrorism law as hyper-legislation
This paper will exhibit aspects of Australia‘s anti-terrorism law as instances of the phenomenon of hyper-legislation. Although much of this law takes the form of criminal law – that is, the establishment of general legal norms prohibiting conduct on pain of punishment – careful attention to the details of the legislation, and to its interaction...
Between Blaming and Naming: Constitutions and Transitional Justice in Post-Soviet States
The quarter-century of politics in twelve non-Baltic post-Soviet states shows the approaches of transitional justice from blaming to naming towards the abuses of human rights committed by Soviet and post-Soviet regimes. All post-Soviet regimes officially blame Stalinist regime in general while very few – Georgia and Ukraine – actually blame post-Stalinist regime, name concrete perpetrators...
Bringing the Sunflower Movement into Perspective: Building the Rule of Law on a Flawed Political Foundation
The Sunflower Movement will go down in Taiwan‘s history as one of the most significant incidents in the 21st century, yet we are only beginning to understand its significance. I use Weingast‘s theory of democratic consolidation to argue that the Cross-Strait Service Pact crossed the limit of the institutional capacity of TW‘s constitutional design, exposing...