Entering this century, Taiwan and Hong Kong both saw drastic political transformation while TW liberalized and HK faced further limitation. A puzzle is why, despite diverging legal-political contexts, the local legal profession both grew to split? I argue for an ideational explanation. Namely, the legal profession is not an it but they. Their ideals of...
Tag: <span>WEDNESDAY JUNE 27 2018 10:45 AM – 12:15 PM</span>
Lawmaking in 21st Century Canada: Executive Power and the Search for Accountability
Canada prides itself as an exemplar of democracy and the rule of law. It has constitutionally entrenched fundamental rights and freedoms and scores highly on studies assessing the quality of its legal system. Yet its clean bill of health and sterling reputation abroad masks the less positive reality of lawmaking in 21st century Canada. Most...
Law or Power: An Application of Legal Theory To The Practice of American National Security Policies
The US government has employed torture, drone assassination, and suspended due process in its “War on Terror. These methods have been criticized on moral grounds for violating basic principles of justice and constitutional grounds for usurping power not delegated to the executive. My critique focuses on a third overlooked factor. I show that many actions...
Judicial contributions to democratization: cases from post-war Africa
This paper considers post-Cold War African cases relevant to the issue of democratization. Institutional weakness continues to cripple some African courts, but others repay richer study. The Constitutional Court of Benin, stand-out of West Africa, has played a regular role in electoral disputes. The Kenyan Supreme Court has adopted a bolder, if sometimes precarious, stance...
Workplace (in)justice, law and labour resistance in Vietnam
The limitations of labour law and its implementation in Vietnam have been identified by scholars as the main reasons for the persistence of factory strikes, yet there has been little analysis concerning how workers themselves perceive the labour law and how law matters in workers‘ resistance to abusive practices. This paper explores how workers‘ ideas...
Religious Freedom and Abuse
This research will deal with the notion of protected democracy with regard to extremist Islamic movements and their role as anti-systemic forces. This topic is still mostly overlooked from a juridical, or rather a constitutional, point of view. This essay will evaluate the main legislative, administrative and judiciary measures that banned Islamist movements in some...
Parliamentary oversight between security exceptions and executive confidentiality
Parliamentary oversight requires accessibility of information. In foreign and security policy however, executive institutions have possession and discretion over (sensitive) information. Practice shows that oversight at times is not activated at all due to ‘deep secrets‘, i.e. parliaments are unaware of certain executive action or its scope (the case with the PRISM programme and U.S....
Parliamentary Supremacy in the Commonwealth: Dominions and the struggle for legislative autonomy
The story of legislative autonomy in the Dominions typically ends with the incorporate of the Statute of Westminster. This overlooks the subsequent struggles within the Dominions to establish some form of parliamentary supremacy as an internal norm within their constitutional structures. This was particularly noticeable in those Dominions which possessed a unitary form of government,...
Parliamentary access to information in two different yet similar domains: Economic and security governance compared
At first sight, parliamentary participation in Economic and Security governance within the European Union (EU) do not appear to have much in common. In particular, in the economic and monetary area many competences have been transferred to the EU level or, at least, the EU coordinates Member States policy, By contrast, the security area is...
Parliamentary control of Europol: challenges of collective access to information
Parliamentary control of security policies uncovers an apparent paradox: it relies on the sharing of information that is strictly put under executive dominance not to harm the essential security interests. This issue is gaining renewed interest at European level after the establishment of the Joint Parliamentary Scrutiny Group (JPSG) on Europol. Access to sensitive non-classified...