Search results

The purpose of this paper is to detail a simulation exploring the academic and real-world debates surrounding constitutional design.

The authors deployed this simulation in different contexts: undergraduate courses in comparative politics and middle school classrooms of gifted students in India.

In conjunction with discussion of institutional setup, such as parliamentary vs presidential systems and judicial review vs parliamentary sovereignty, the students were required to design a new constitution for a fictional country that just overthrew a brutal dictator. Throughout the simulation, the students were assigned to be the representatives of a particular ethnic group, each with distinct interests to be represented during the constitutional convention.

The authors detail the learning objectives and simulation setup for this constitutional convention. Finally, the authors discuss some issues raised by the students during the simulation.

This article aims to provide a response to the papers in this issue.

The methodology employed is philosophical.

In her response, Nussbaum thanks the authors for their contributions and addresses their most salient arguments.

Nussbaum in this article responds to the papers in this issue of IJSE and addresses the authors' most salient arguments.

The object of this research is the reconstruction of the existing legal response by European Union states to the phenomenon of immigration. It seeks to analyse the process of conferral of protection.

One main dimension is selected and discussed: the case law of the national courts. The study focuses on the legal status of immigrants resulting from the intervention of these national courts.

The research shows that although the courts have conferred an increasing protection on immigrants, this has not challenged the fundamental principle of the sovereignty of the states to decide, according to their discretionary prerogatives, which immigrants are allowed to enter and stay in their territories. Notwithstanding the differences in the general constitutional and legal structures, the research also shows that the courts of the three countries considered – France, Germany and Spain – have progressively moved towards converging solutions in protecting immigrants.

The research contributes to a better understanding of the different legal orders analysed.

Work-based research is the applied form of work-based learning (WBL) and has been described as the systematic and methodical process of investigating work-related “problems”. Such problems can either be associated with specific workplaces and domains of practice or may more broadly be described as practical, social or real-world in nature. However, the specific characteristics of work-related problems for organisations and society have yet to be explained, and inadequate problem definition, multiple and competing goals, and lack of agreement on cause-effect relationships have hampered understanding. The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of work-related problems and provides examples from real-world contexts in Australia.

The paper provides models and examples of standard and non-standard work-related problems based on prior research and current practice.

Research paradigms view work-related problems as either definable and solvable or ill-defined, complex, difficult to describe and not easily rectified. The former view is concerned with “high ground problems” associated with traditional research methods; the latter with “lowland, messy, confusing problems” more frequently associated with the social sciences. Irrespective of orientation and definition, work-related problems have one thing in common: they are typically messy, constantly changing and complex, and many are co-produced and wicked.

Despite difficulties with identifying and isolating the various types of work-related problem, the paper establishes the importance of doing so for the practitioner. The definition and examination of work-related problems contribute to an evolving formulation of WBL and its application to private organisations, government agencies and work more generally.

This chapter presents an analysis of the constitutional definitions of the right to education. Four countries of the Southern Common Market are selected: Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay (member countries) and Chile (an associate State). A conceptual definition of the right to education -from the human rights-based perspective- is provided in order to analyze, from a comparative standpoint, the constitutional norms of each country. In recent decades, these countries have experienced recurrent school reforms which, as they are framed within legal definitions, have regulated the right to education as a premise for overcoming social inequalities. First, a definition of this concept is provided. Second, the national constitutions of each country are analyzed so as to identify the definitions they have in this field. Subsequently, a comparative discussion of the underlying regulatory definitions of the right to education is carried out. Finally, the scope and limitations that the constitutional texts of these countries have on the right to education are discussed, which allow for a better understanding of school reform processes that were carried out during the last decades and that had the right to education as an object of regulation and reconfiguration.

To clarify our analysis, we start with a conceptual explanation of synarchy and the key terms that we need to use in this chapter. Synarchy is a neologism that combines synthesis with anarchy. We will first look at how these two contrasting ideas are linked. In juxtaposition, they provide a basis for understanding contemporary public administration in a global and comparative context.

One of the most dramatic controversies over judicial independence in the United States occurred at the state level, in antebellum Kentucky, when two entirely different state high courts remained in operation, each claiming to be the only legitimate tribunal. This chapter describes Kentucky's two-court crisis, but focuses primarily on the constitutional convention of 1849, which followed it. Through the lens of modern scholarship about judicial independence, the lessons that antebellum Kentuckians drew from their own history seem quite counterintuitive. They did not view their project of judicial design as a matter of balancing judicial independence with accountability, a task that many modern scholars of American politics have posited as the central problem of judicial design. Instead, Kentucky's constitutional convention sought to structure an institution that would allow the state's courts to respond to popular sentiment without compromising their independence. Thus, these debates suggest frameworks for understanding judicial independence that do not pit independence against judicial accountability or popular politics, but attempt to discern which forms of politics threaten the independence of courts, and which forms may not.

This chapter is intended to elaborate on the existing academic literature addressing the migration of constitutional ideas. Through an examination of ongoing efforts to enshrine “defamation of religion” as a violation of international human rights, the author confirms that the phenomenon of migration is not restricted to positive constitutional norms, but rather also encompasses negative ideas that ultimately may serve to undermine international and domestic constitutionalism. More specifically, the case study demonstrates that the movement of anti-constitutional ideas is not restricted to the domain of “international security” law, and further, that the vertical axis linking international and domestic law is in fact a two-way channel that permits the transmission of domestic anti-constitutional ideas up to the international level.

In reaching the findings presented herein, the chapter also adds to the universalism–relativism debate by demonstrating that allowances for “plurality consciousness” on the international level may in certain instances undermine fundamental norms previously negotiated and accepted as authoritative by the international community. From this perspective, the movement in favor of prohibiting “defamation of religion” is not merely a case study that helps to expand our understanding of how anti-constitutional ideas migrate, but also indicative of a reenergized campaign to challenge the status, content, and stability of universal human rights norms.

This chapter proposes a sociological reconstruction of the emergence of citizenship as a source of legitimacy for political institutions, and it focuses on examining the historical processes that first gave rise to this concept. It explains how citizenship has its origins in the transformation of feudal law, a process that culminated in patterns of military organization that characterized the rise of the early modern state in Europe. On this basis, it describes how the growth of constitutional democracy was integrally marked by the militarization of society and explains that military pressures have remained palpable in constitutional constructions of citizenship. In particular, it argues that, through the early growth of democracy, national citizenship practices were closely linked to global conflicts, and they tended to replicate such conflicts in national contexts. It concludes by showing how more recent processes of constitutional norm formation, based largely in international human rights law, have acted to soften the military dimensions of citizenship.