The proposed panel will discuss external assistance to constitution making. The panelists all have recent experience in delivering such advice in dozens of countries around the globe. Reflecting on their own experiences, the panel will discuss questions such as: – Does external constitutional advice contribute to a growing global constitutionalism? Is this a problematic or...
Tag: <span>Tom Ginsburg</span>
CONSTITUTIONAL DEMOCRACY IN CRISIS? I
The early twenty-first century appears of be a period of turmoil in many seemingly stable constitutional democracies. This panel and two others discuss such questions as these: Are there general forces weakening constitutional democracy around the world, or are there nation-specific reasons for crises that simply happen to be occurring at roughly the same time?...
“Defining and Tracking the Trajectory of Liberal Constitutional Democracy“
We provide some definitional and empirical scaffolding for thinking about whether the Egyptian and Turkish cases are outliers or exemplars of the current state of democracy. This means first considering how “democracy“ should be defined and analyzed. We argue that in thinking about democratic decline, it is most useful to focus on ‘liberal constitutional democracy’‘...
Near Misses: Avoiding Constitutional Retrogression
There has been a good deal of attention to constitutional backsliding and erosion in many democracies around the work, including established democracies like the United States, Israel and Japan. Several newer democracies have failed completely. Understanding the processes by which backsliding occurs also draws our attention to cases in which it does not. What explains...
Populism and losing constitutional democracy
Populism is now a major global force, challenging our vision of constitutionalism but not upending it completely. By reasserting the importance of a political community, populism in our era provides an important corrective to globalism. Drawing on a forthcoming book with Aziz Huq, this paper argues that populism can fit in the framework of liberal...
Reflections on external assistance to constitution making
Professor Ginsburg reflects on recent experiences in contexts as diverse as Tuvalu and Nepal, Chile and the Arab Region to discuss how external assistance impact constitutional design choices.