Peace agreements concluded after internal armed conflicts often stipulate radical constitutional change. When this is envisioned to take place within an existing constitution, it creates normativity clashes between the constitution and the peace agreement by circumventing constitutional amendment procedures or conflicting with the unamendable constitutional principles. This paper sets out the manifestations of such clashes...
Tag: <span>TUESDAY JUNE 26 2018 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM</span>
A Boat On The Horizon: Legislative Urgency and Weak-form Review
Weak-form systems of judicial review have been praised as a means of reconciling democratic self-governance with constitutionalism, providing for popular engagement with counter-majoritarian decisions through a democratically elected body. Central to the normative appeal of this model is the notion that the legislature will engage in deliberation and contestation regarding the desirable scope of rights-protections....
All the world‘s a stage (of popular sovereignty): Catalan referendum between the script, performance, and calculus
In their selective iconoclasm, those who have moved beyond a sovereign people have also neglected the unwritten scripts of constitutional change that accompany the vocabulary of popular sovereignty. Those are the scripts that Catalan sovereigntists, to their disappointment, tried to perform in an attempt to impress relevant spectators—the external actors for whom they believed had...
An Appraisal of Legislative Procedure in the Singapore Parliament
This article critically examines legislative procedure in the Singapore Parliament. It explains how procedure can provide the time, information, and opportunities for effective legislative scrutiny by Parliament. It then considers in detail the different stages of law making which Parliament is or should be involved in—the passage of Government Bills, pre- and post-legislative scrutiny, subsidiary...
Ancestry into Opportunity: Dual Citizenship and Commodification
Since the 1990s, dozens of countries changed their laws to permit multiple citizenship. Numerous European Union (EU) countries – including Spain, Italy, Hungary, Poland and Romania – adopted laws that invite co-ethnics, emigrants and their descendants to reacquire citizenship from abroad. Millions of persons in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Israel have taken advantage of...
Arendt’s Phenomenology of the Political
This intervention is based on a chapter where Hannah Arendt is taken as the most representative thinker of the autonomy of the political in modern constitutional orders. What is challenged in the chapter is her idea of political action as action by plurality. The author points out that her account of plurality travels so freely...
Asian Americans and Racial Justice
Exploring how colorism operates in the Asian American community yields important insights about how anti-Black prejudice is formed and deployed. As many Asian American groups arguably fall into an intermediary category labeled “Honorary White,“ under this system of pigmentocracy, inequality will actually worsen but creation of the intermediary category allows Whites to remain at the...
Brexit: Constitutional identity as an obstacle to multilevel governance?
The UK‘s planned exit from the EU is a constitutionally momentous decision. Significant constitutional questions regarding the causes and consequences can be raised. One important aspect is the constant undercurrent of British constitutional dissatisfaction with supranational multilevel governance. Key questions are the following: First, why has EU multilevel governance been perceived as a threat to...
Choice and fraud: Conceptualizing and operationalizing identity by public law
The paper investigates the role of public law in identity politics, identifying potential angles to the scrutiny, such as (i) whether are there are existing legal definitions for the “source“ of identity; (ii) whether the definitions concern the majority community (or communities), or only minorities, and whether there are illuminative differences; (iii) how membership criteria...