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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.

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.

As coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) spreads globally, the economic and health consequences are disproportionately affecting marginalized workers. However, countries' existing labor and social security laws often exclude the most vulnerable workers from coverage, exacerbating existing inequalities. Guaranteeing the rights to adequate income even when ill, decent working conditions and nondiscrimination in constitutions may provide a foundation for protecting rights universally, safeguarding against counterproductive austerity measures, and providing a normative foundation for equality and inclusion as economies recover. The purpose of this article is to examine the prevalence of these rights globally and assess some of their early impacts amid the pandemic.

The authors created and analyzed a database of constitutional rights for all 193 United Nations member states. All constitutions were double coded by an international multidisciplinary, multilingual team of researchers.

This study finds that 54% of countries take some approach to guaranteeing income security in their constitutions, including 23% that guarantee income security during illness. Thirty-one percent guarantee the right to safe working conditions. Only 36% of constitutions explicitly guarantee at least some aspect of nondiscrimination at work. With respect to equal rights broadly, constitutional protections are most common on the basis of sex (85%), followed by religion (78%), race/ethnicity (76%), socioeconomic status (59%), disability (27%), citizenship (22%), sexual orientation (5%) and gender identity (3%). Across almost all areas, protections for rights are far more common in constitutions adopted more recently.

This is the first study to systematically examine protections for income security and decent work, together with nondiscrimination, in the constitutions of all 193 UN member states.

Rights constitute a familiar feature of the liberal discourse of judging. This chapter seeks to recast this discourse away from the language of rights by considering two cases where liberals often invoke it: abortion and same-sex marriage. I argue that the presence of rights in American constitutional discourse exacerbates the counter-majoritarian nature of judicial review. We do better to recast the language of judging from an emphasis on protecting rights to an emphasis on making sure that the demos acts on publicly justifiable reasons. In doing so, I proffer a novel analysis of liberal theory's extant commitment to public reason, one that conceptualizes public reason as representing the scope of state power.

We argue that the proliferation of governance in the public sector has raised questions regarding individual constitutional rights. While some proclaim cost savings and entrepreneurial solutions to vexing social ills, others suspect that these benefits donʼt outweigh the risk of diminished accountability and the loss of constitutional protection over public service production. We propose a new model to examine the relationships between direct government, governance, public value, and public law value. We apply this model to analyze two landmark Supreme Court cases and one contemporary federal appellate court case to explore the ongoing tension between the governance model and public service production. Our findings suggest that enforcible contract language and public-private entwinement can be used as tools to protect constitutional rights in the face of increasing pressure of governance approaches.

The CoViD-19 pandemic has brought about a panoply of institutional challenges both domestically and in the international arena. Classical constitutional theory thereby underwent a reinvention by the executive for the sake of speedy policy action and to the detriment of institutional control while favouring authoritarian forms of governance. This paper concerns itself with institutional responses to such developments, placing emphasis on the role of the judiciary and people*s in contesting emergency decrees and other executive orders, especially where fundamental rights are infringed upon. The paper aims to explore the difficulties arising with exerting absolute executive powers during the health crisis, the respective role assumed by constitutional courts and the impact of the new governance paradigm on forms of public contestation, also as a means of quasi institutional control.

Indeed, the right to health may be translated into political discourse and become foundational to security and public interest paradigms. This may result in a shrinking public space given the constraints to the freedom of movement. In the name of public safety, the (collective) right to assembly, expression and protest have been submitted to major limitations in that regard.

Ultimately, this re-opens debates on the meaning of absolute rights and contextualities of derogations, as well as the reconcilability of civil and political rights and economic, social and cultural rights. It also exposes social inequalities, social justice dimensions and vulnerabilities, often exacerbated by the health crisis; migrant rights demonstrably face particularly severe and intersectional forms of violations.

Particular values lie with the interdisciplinary approach embraced in this paper; the authors draw on a variety of social sciences disciplines to shed light on this very current issue. Both theoretical and empirical methods are used and combined here, making sense of the underlying logic of virus governance and its impacts on fundamental rights.

Popular constitutionalists seek to recover the popular sovereignty foundations of American constitutionalism, bringing the people in as active participants in the constitutional enterprise as they create and refashion the Constitution by “majoritarian and populist mechanisms” (Amar, 1995, p. 89). The result is to recover an understanding, in FDR's words, of constitution as a “layman's document, not a lawyer's contract” (Kramer, 2004, p. 207). This understanding has deep roots in American constitutionalism, tracing its lineage back to the founding and, as popular constitutionalists insist, finds powerful expression in the likes of The Federalist and Abraham Lincoln (Ackerman, 1991; Tushnet, 1998). In exercising popular sovereignty, the people founded the Constitution, but they did not simply retreat from the trajectory of constitutional development. Rather, as Bruce Ackerman argues, since the Constitution of 1787 the people have spoken in a manner that has re-founded the Constitution giving us a “multiple origins originalism” (Kersch, 2006a, p. 801; see also Amar, 1998 and 2005). In turning to founding era thought and the notion of constitutional foundations, popular constitutionalists like Ackerman and Amar make common cause with conservatives who turn to original intent, but then they seek to synthesize this understanding with democratic expressions of popular will by emphasizing both formal and informal constitutional change, giving us layered “foundings,” and a more complex version of “living constitutionalism.” Such constitutional change, however, can only legitimately come from an authentic expression of “We the People.”

We present an instructional strategy called Challenging Constitutional Rights, in which high school civics students critically interacted with, and interpreted, constitutional rights. As an alternative assessment project, students used technologies to make visual and oral presentations on the relationship between a current event and a right detailed in an amendment to the U.S. constitution. In this article, we describe the process of the project, detail the strengths of the project organized around the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) Vision of powerful teaching and learning, and conclude with reflections from the teacher who designed and implemented this project. Exemplars of student work are included.

Years ago, the Katz Commission questioned the constitutionality of certain provisions of the Income Tax Act, 1962. The purpose of this article is to investigate the general principles of human rights litigation and the progress made to date in respect of rectifying the unconstitutional provisions of the Income Tax Act that were identified by the Katz Commission. It has been established that, although some unconstitutional provisions have been amended, others still prevail, and that, in the light of the factors identified, they will probably not be challenged successfully by taxpayers.

What does it mean in practice to claim a right? Does claiming a right add to the persuasive power of political demands? Does it clothe political demands with a moral urgency, setting such claims apart from the ordinary class of interests? In examining these questions, I suggest that in practice rights’ claims add little to political discourse. This is because Americans equate their policy preferences with rights. I find scant evidence for the belief that Americans have sufficient knowledge of rights to make them meaningful or that pronouncements of rights have persuasive power or imbue issues with heightened moral legitimacy.