Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 2 of 2
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
Constitution-Making Gone Wrong, David E. Landau
Constitution-Making Gone Wrong, David E. Landau
David E Landau
With the recent wave of regime change in the Middle East, the process of constitution-making must again become a central concern for those interested in comparative law and politics. The conception of constitutional politics associated with Jon Elster and Bruce Ackerman views constitution-making as a potentially higher form of lawmaking with different dynamics than ordinary politics and states that ideally, constitution-making should be designed so as to be a relatively deliberative process where the role of group and institutional interests is deemphasized. I argue that a focus on achieving deliberation and transformation through constitution-making is unrealistic in certain situations and …
The Reality Of Social Rights Enforcement, David E. Landau
The Reality Of Social Rights Enforcement, David E. Landau
David E Landau
Despite the American refusal to include socio-economic rights in the U.S. constitution or to enforce them, the vast majority of constitutions around the world now include these rights, and courts are enforcing them in increasingly aggressive and creative ways. Scholars have produced a large and theoretically rich literature on the topic. Virtually all of this literature assumes that social rights enforcement is about the advancement of impoverished, marginalized groups. Moreover, the consensus recommendation of that literature, according to scholars like Cass Sunstein and Mark Tushnet, is that courts can enforce socio-economic rights but should do so in a weak-form or …