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Comparative and Foreign Law Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Constitutional Law

BLR

2005

Public Law and Legal Theory

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Comparative and Foreign Law

Breaking The Bank: Revisiting Central Bank Of Denver After Enron And Sarbanes-Oxley, Celia Taylor Sep 2005

Breaking The Bank: Revisiting Central Bank Of Denver After Enron And Sarbanes-Oxley, Celia Taylor

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No abstract provided.


The Paradox Of Omnipotence: Courts, Constitutions, And Commitments, David S. Law Apr 2005

The Paradox Of Omnipotence: Courts, Constitutions, And Commitments, David S. Law

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Sovereigns, like individuals, must sometimes make commitments that limit their own freedom of action in order to accomplish their goals. Social scientists have observed that constitutional arrangements can, by restricting a sovereign’s power, enable the sovereign to make such commitments. This essay advances several claims about the commitment problems that sovereigns face. First, constitutions do not necessarily solve such problems but can instead aggravate them, by entrenching inalienable governmental powers and immunities. Second, sovereigns and other actors face two distinct varieties of commitment problems – undercommitment and overcommitment – between which they must steer: an actor that can bind itself …


Constitutionalism Through The Looking Glass Of Latin America, Miguel Schor Apr 2005

Constitutionalism Through The Looking Glass Of Latin America, Miguel Schor

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This Article explores the following question: why did constitutionalism in Latin America take a different path than in the United States? Constitutions were adopted throughout the New World in the wake of independence movements in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to effectuate republican government. Yet constitutionalism in Latin America led to dictatorship whereas constitutionalism in the United States led to republican government. The conventional answer to this issue is that the constitution was entrenched in the United States because law is independent from politics, whereas constitutions were not entrenched in Latin America because politics trumped constitutions. This Article …


Water Justice In South Africa: Natural Resources Policy At The Intersection Of Human Rights, Economics, & Political Power, Rose Francis Mar 2005

Water Justice In South Africa: Natural Resources Policy At The Intersection Of Human Rights, Economics, & Political Power, Rose Francis

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This paper analyzes water as a social justice issue in South Africa, a nation that has undergone tremendous political and legal transformations over the last fifteen years, but whose population nonetheless continues to suffer from severe inequities in access to freshwater resources. In light of growing water scarcity worldwide, this paper highlights that legal treatment of water resources has significant socioeconomic and distributive justice impacts, even in progressive constitutional democracies that have embraced principles of human rights and international legal norms. The paper explores historical changes in South African water law and evaluates the current political and legal status of …