The new media and communication technologies have significantly increased the number of online cross-border disputes between individuals and businesses involving the security and protection of personal identity and intellectual creations. The digital era challenges the traditional methods of coordination between States, based on geographical localization, revealing a substantial gap in Internet governance world-wide, which leads...
Tag: <span>TUESDAY JUNE 26 2018 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM</span>
Shotgun Referendums: Popular Deliberation in Contested Regions
Much deliberative democracy theory examines the capacity of public institutions to promote governance by deliberation instead of bald coercion. Recent works have even examined the prospects for deliberation during an exercise long thought to be paradigmatically anti-deliberative: referendum voting. Tierney, Fishkin, Kildea, and Levy have assessed the possibilities of designing ‘deliberative referendums‘. Yet these past...
“Beyond Legitimacy: Europe’s Crisis of Constitutional Democracy“
I engage with the more particular question, if there is currently a crisis of constitutional democracy in Europe, focusing mainly on the European Union rather than Europe more generally. Before taking on that question, however, there are two preliminary questions we need to address: First, what counts as a crisis of constitutional democracy? Second, how...
(International) Law as Answer to Moral Risk
We argue that the idea of moral risk is necessary to understanding (a) the nature of certain morally significant relationships and their constitutive rights, duties, and responsibilities; and (b) the nature of (international) law and the character of legal rights, duties, and responsibilities. Moral risk is exposure to harmful normative change (normative change being change...
(Re-)Characterizing Headscarf and Veil Bans as Harassment
This paper considers the possibility of using the prohibition of harassment under European anti-discrimination laws to fight the legality of headscarf bans. In fact, so far Muslim women have been unsuccessful in litigating such bans both before the ECtHR and CJEU. Rather than configuring these cases as violations of religious freedom or direct/indirect discrimination on...
CHALLENGES AND TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE SEPARATION OF POWERS
The principle of the separation of powers, far from being simply a constitutional principle for the organisation of public powers, is actually one of the traces that enables us to historically reconstruct the changes in constitutionalism and the original idea of defending the individual from the will of state power. We are today in the midst of a deep transformation of the public sphere,...
THE AUTHORITARIAN PUSHBACK AND THE RESILIENCE OF INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS – PART 2
More than a decade after the emergence of public law approaches to international institutions, such as Global Administrative Law, Global Constitutionalism, or International Public Authority, the international order has changed dramatically. The Trump administration and Brexit epitomize a growing trend against global governance. What had once been taken for granted – the proliferation of institutional...
COMMON LEGAL DRAFTING RULES FOR THE PORTUGUESE-SPEAKING COUNTRIES AND REGIONS
Legal drafting is the area of knowledge that envisages the creation of rules, standards and methods to draft laws with quality. This panel presents a research project of the Lisbon Centre for Research in Public Law which aims the definition of common standards for legal drafting in the Portuguese speaking countries and regions (Angola, Brazil,...
THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF CHINESE CONSTITUTIONALISM
This panel investigates the changing landscape of Chinese constitutionalism from three aspects: the rise of the Supreme People’s Court in protecting property rights, the establishment of the National Supervisory Commission and the unconstitutional constitutional changes regarding market economic institutions.
INTERNATIONAL NORMS AND CONSTITUTIONAL CHANGE IN UNRECEPTIVE ENVIRONMENTS: THE SOUTH EAST ASIAN CONUNDRUM I (THE INVESTEE STATE)
How do international norms bring about constitutional and administrative change in apparently unreceptive environments? In South East Asia there is sensitivity to international law intruding on domestic sovereignty; a patchy tradition of constitutional democracy; and the central vehicle for international engagement, ASEAN, largely eschews binding norms. This panel nevertheless hypothesises that international norms have brought...