International Law Commons^™

Enforcing Interstate Compacts In Federal Systems, Michael Osborn

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

The central goal of a federal system is for local government units to retain degrees of independence, specifically over matters of importance to that local unit. A logical corollary to that independence is the ability for local units to negotiate and contract with other local units on matters of importance. Therefore, it is not surprising that almost every federal system allows, either implicitly or explicitly, member states to form binding compacts with other states, the union government, or municipalities.1 Some federal democracies even allow member states to compact with foreign governments. Furthermore, almost every federal constitution includes a provision outlining …

Policing In A Democratic Constitution, Michael Wasco

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

Most constitutions contain provisions relating to or impacting policing. Separate from the armed forces and intelligence services, the police are the state’s internal security apparatus, and codifying issues related to policing within a constitution can ensure efficient service delivery and human rights protections.

Originating from the Libyan constitution making process, this paper provides a taxonomy of options for constitution drafters and scholars. More so than other issues, such as separation of powers or human rights protections generally, policing sections are very country specific. While not advocating for specific best practices, the work gives ample justifications for certain policing principles and …

To Secede Or Not Secede? Is It Even Possible?, T. Z. Cook

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Secession seems like a concept of the past. In our increasingly globalizing world, nationalism was growing archaic and halting progress. But secession has seen a surge in the last ten years. Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008. The United Kingdom seceded from the European Union in the infamous "Brexit." And in 2017, Catalonia's grab for independence sparked the worst crisis in Spain since the days of Francisco Franco.1 Alongside these high-profile secessions, smaller movements, which until now were simply brewing and bubbling, are becoming inspired. One such movement is "The South is My Country," a coalition of three southern …

We Are All Farkhunda: An Examination Of The Treatment Of Women Within Afghanistan's Formal Legal System, Ashley Lenderman

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

In this paper, I will examine three cases of violence against women that went through the Afghan formal legal system: the case of Farkhunda, the Paghman district gang rape case, and the case of Sahar Gul. In the first Part, I will discuss the formal legal system framework on which the cases are based. In the second Part, I will discuss the cases in detail. In the third Part, I will describe neo-liberal, reformist, and neo-fundamentalist approaches to interpretation of Islamic law, and I will then draw out pieces of the decisions from the three cases that closely match these …

Taxonomy Of Minority Governments, Lisa La Fornara

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

A minority government in its most basic form is a government in which the party holding the most parliamentary seats still has fewer than half the seats in parliament and therefore cannot pass legislation or advance policy without support from unaffiliated parties. Because seats in minority parliaments are more evenly distributed amongst multiple parties, opposition parties have greater opportunity to block legislation. A minority government must therefore negotiate with external parties and adjust its policies to garner the majority of votes required to advance its initiatives.

This paper serves as a taxonomy of minority governments in recent history and proceeds …

Transnational Constitution-Making: The Contribution Of The Venice Commission On Law And Democracy, Paul Craig

Articles by Maurer Faculty

Commission for Democracy through Law, better known as the Venice Commission. While part of the Council of Europe, the Venice Commission is much less understood than the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), notwithstanding the existing literature. This chapter therefore seeks to explicate and evaluate. It begins by explicating the organizational foundations of the Venice Commission, followed by analysis of its remit and role. The focus then shifts to triggering and working methodology.

The remainder of the article is concerned with evaluation of the Commission’s role in relation to constitution-making as broadly conceived, the analysis being situated within the literature …

Rethinking Article 422: A Retrospective On Ecuador's 2008 Constitutional Isds Recalibration, Alexander B. Avtgis

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

Is Ecuador’s adoption of Article 422 in the 2008 Constitution properly viewed as a “re-statification”1 of Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS)? And, since its implementation, has the constitutional article been effective in institutionally insulating Ecuador from the jurisdictional reach of international ISDS? This paper answers both questions in the negative—but qualifies such an outlook by balancing the drawbacks of Article 422 against its successes. Article 422’s provisions, strident in its attempt to create an alternative development vision, did not achieve all that the Constitution’s drafters had hoped. Nevertheless, in its limited effect of detaching Ecuador from certain ISDS fora, it …

The Politics Of Electoral Systems In The Former Yugoslav Republic Of Macedonia, Dardan Berisha

Indiana Journal of Constitutional Design

The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (“FYROM”) experienced four major changes to its electoral system in the eight parliamentary elections held between 1990 and 2014. The Macedonian 1990 and 1994 parliamentary elections were held under a majority system, in which 120 members of the Parliament were elected from 120 constituencies, one member per constituency. A mixed-majority/proportional representation (“PR”) system was adopted for the 1998 elections, in which eighty-five seats were elected under the majority system from the constituencies, and thirty-five seats were elected proportionally from a nation-wide electoral district. Yet another system was adopted for the 2002 elections, in which …

Maintaining The Balance Of Power: A Typology Of Primacy Clauses In Federal Systems, Brady Harman

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Constitutional design has become a novel and globalized legal profession. As such, practitioners in this new field-advisers and consultants of constitutional formation and reformation processesrequire practical and comparative tools to ply their trade. This Note attempts to fill a gap in constitutional design literature and provide such a tool by methodically examining "primacy clauses." By determining whether national or provincial law prevails when the two are in conflict, primacy clauses play an important role in maintaining federal balances of power. Three primacy approaches are found among the world's federal constitutions: national primacy, provincial primacy, and conditional primacy. This Note explores …

Free Exercise After The Arab Spring: Protecting Egypt’S Religious Minorities Under The Country’S New Constitution, James Michael Nossett

Indiana Law Journal

No abstract provided.

The Visible Effects Of An Invisible Constitution: The Contested State Of Transdniestria's Search For Recognition Through International Negotiations, Nadejda Mazur

Maurer Theses and Dissertations

Most scholars agree that modern states share several defining characteristics: a population, territory, government, and the capacity to enter into international relations. More recently, this list has expanded to include the criteria of democracy, the rule of law, and the protection of human rights. These traditional and contemporary criteria for statehood are likewise essential for settling the status of de facto states, entities that seek international recognition yet are rebuffed by the world community.

By examining the criteria for international recognition from the perspective of constitutional law, this dissertation reveals the existing but overlooked relationship between the recognition process and …

Unpopular Constitutionalism, Mila Versteeg

Indiana Law Journal

Constitutions are commonly thought to express nations’ highest values. They are often proclaimed in the name of “We the People” and are regarded—by scholars and the general public alike—as an expression of the people’s views and values. This Article shows empirically that this widely held image of constitutions does not correspond with the reality of constitution making around the world. The Article contrasts the constitutional-rights choices of ninety countries between 1981 and 2010 with data from nearly one-half million survey responses on cultural, religious, and social values conducted over the same period. It finds, surprisingly, that in this period, the …

Emerging Patterns Of Global Constitutionalization: Toward A Conceptual Framework, Karolina Milewicz

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Global constitutionalization is a recent phenomenon that is decisively changing the character of the international order. This argument was put forward recently by scholars of international law and has gained significance in the institutional school of thought. However, the notion of "global constitutionalization" is often used imprecisely and has so far been largely neglected in the field of international relations. It still lacks a consistent and operational definition, which would enable political scientists and international relations scholars to conduct empirical research. This article explores a preliminary framework for the concept of global constitutionalization.

Global Constitutionalism – Process and Substance, Symposium. …

Misreading And Mobility In Constitutional Texts: A Nineteenth Century Case, Iza Hussin

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This article explores the case of the adoption of Southeast Asia's first constitution (Johor, 1895) to articulate a fundamental problem of translation-the ambiguity and multiplicity of law's language. Closer attention to this problem helps raise a number of possibilities for rethinking the relationship between law, language, and mobility: firstly, polyphony, dissonance, and divergence in law's language reveals a plethora of political possibilities, audiences, and actors in the making of law; secondly, these ambiguities and multiplicities are integral to law's mobility; thirdly, rather than transmissions of law from center to periphery, law moves in circulations that are iterative, contingent, and patterned. …

Expanding Constitutionalism, Gunther Teubner, Anna Beckers

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Transnational Societal Constitutionalism Symposium, Collegio Carlo Alberto, Turin Italy, May 17-19, 2012

Jurisgenerative Constitutionalism: Procedural Principles For Managing Global Legal Pluralism, Paul Schiff Berman

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Global Legal Pluralism recognizes the inevitability (and sometimes even the desirability) of multiple legal and quasi-legal systems purporting to regulate the same act or actor. However, the resulting pluralism-just as inevitably-creates conflicts among norms that are potentially intractable. Thus, legal systems must address how best to respond to the realities of pluralism. This inquiry has constitutional dimensions because it goes to the constitutive character of communities and their relationships with other communities, be they international, transnational, national, subnational, or epistemic.

One response to pluralism is jurispathic: "kill off" all competing laws by declaring that one set of norms-and only one-shall …

The Cosmopolitan Turn In Constitutionalism: An Integrated Conception Of Public Law, Mattias Kumm

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

If the point of constitutionalism is to define the legal framework within which collective self-government can legitimately take place, constitutionalism has to take a cosmopolitan turn: it has to occupy itself with the global legitimacy conditions for the exercise of state sovereignty. Contrary to widely made implicit assumptions in constitutional theory and practice, constitutional legitimacy is not self-standing. Whether a national constitution and the political practices authorized by it are legitimate does not depend only on the appropriate democratic quality and rights-respecting nature of domestic legal practices. Instead, national constitutional legitimacy depends, in part, on how the national constitution is …

A Sociology Of Constituent Power: The Political Code Of Transnational Societal Constitutions, Christopher Thornhill

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This article proceeds from a critical sociological revision of classical constitutional theory. In particular, it argues for a sociological reconstruction of the central concepts of constitutional theory: constituent power and rights. These concepts, it is proposed, first evolved as an internal reflexive dimension of the modern political system, which acted originally to stabilize the political system as a relatively autonomous aggregate of actors, adapted to the differentiated interfaces of a modern society.

This revision of classical constitutional theory provides a basis for a distinctive account of transnational constitutional pluralism or societal constitutionalism. The article argues that the construction of transnational …

We And Cyberlaw: The Spatial Unity Of Constitutional Orders, Hans Lindahl

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This paper scrutinizes the fundamental assumption governing Gunther Teubner's theory of societal constitutionalism, namely that societal constitutions are ultimately about the regulation of inclusion and exclusion in global function systems. While endorsing the central role of inclusion/exclusion in constitutions, societal or otherwise, I argue that inclusion and exclusion are primordial categories of collective action, rather than functional categories. As a result, the self-closure which gives rise to a legal collective is spatial as much as it is temporal, and subjective no less than material. Inasmuch as legal orders must establish who ought to do what, where, and when, this entails, …

On The Politics Of Societal Constitutionalism, Emilios Christodoulidis

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

This paper is an internal critique of the theory of societal constitutionalism as developed by Gunther Teubner, with a specific emphasis on the constitutional and the political dimensions of the theory. As critique it focuses on the arguably unacknowledged dangers of co-option: the danger that constitutionalization, as an ongoing process, undercuts what we typically associate with the constitutional, which is its framing function; that this problem is accentuated when it comes to the transnational; and that its reflexivity runs the danger of market capture, in which case it remains only nominally political. The danger of market capture for societal constitutionalism …

The Future Of Societal Constitutionalism In The Age Of Acceleration, Riccardo Prandini

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The aim of this article is to reframe the debate on societal constitutionalism and constitutionalization from a spatial to a temporal framework. This analytical shift is due to the dramatic acceleration of societal processes, which are increasingly crossing the spatial boundaries of nation-states and of all the other social structures embedded in peculiar places. This high-speed society is characterized by the so-called temporalization of complexity, which influences every aspect of social life and, in particular, the "validity" of law. On the basis of this theoretical background, I would like to show that changing the form of observation from a spatial …

Transnational Normative Orders: The Constitutionalism Of Intra- And Trans-Normative Law, Poul F. Kjaer

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

No weakening, but rather an expansion, of statehood can be observed in the contemporary world. This does not, on the other hand, imply that extensive forms of constitutional ordering do not exist outside the realm of states. Instead, the evolution of world society has been characterized by a protracted dual movement where the expansion and densification of statehood and autonomous forms of transnational ordering gradually emerged in a mutually constitutive fashion. One implication of this is that neither the concept of the state nor the concept of nonstate transnational entities is adequately capable of delineating the object of constitutional analysis. …

Occupy The System! Societal Constitutionalism And Transnational Corporate Accounting, Moritz Renner

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Today's most pressing constitutional question is posed by a global economic system whose expansive tendencies seem no longer controllable. In addressing this question, the theory of Societal Constitutionalism apparently shifts established ideological coordinates by developing a theory of the self-constitutionalization of social spheres. It seeks to combine the virtues of grassroots democracy with the sophistication of systemic social theory. Thus, its normative claim can be formulated as an oxymoron: "Occupy the System!" The claim is an oxymoron because it points to the apparent impossibility of critical social theory in a functionally differentiated society: How can a functional system such as …

Fundamental Rights, Private Law, And Societal Constitution: On The Logic Of The So-Called Horizontal Effect, Florian Roedl

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The paper raises the issue of a normative justification of the horizontal effect of fundamental rights in private law. Justification in this sense means that the reasons given are neither functional nor instrumental, but that the reasons are supposed to be subject to the intrinsic logic of private law. In traditional doctrine, the reason usually given to confer horizontal effect to fundamental rights is a deferral to the constitution: The constitutional text decides whether and how fundamental rights apply to private legal relationships. This answer implies that fundamental rights are either logically or normatively alien to private law, that they …

Societal Constitutionalism, Social Movements, And Constitutionalism From Below, Gavin W. Anderson

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Within constitutional theory, in comparison to other fields of scholarship, the significance of transnational social movements has been relatively unexamined in the literature. Societal constitutionalism, grounded in the sociological method and open to reexamining received understandings of constitutionalism, would appear conducive to undertaking this enterprise. However, the general absence of social movements from the societal constitutionalism literature is not coincidental, and reflects a shared commitment with more conventional approaches to an institutional conception of constitutionalism, and a belief in the latter's necessary benevolence and Western origin. These assumptions reflect the limited focus of contemporary analyses of globalization and constitutionalism upon …

Private Governance Of Knowledge: Societally-Crafted Intellectual Properties Regimes, Dan Wielsch

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The evolutionary challenge global society faces is the decentralized development of legal rules that multilaterally protect social autonomies from violating each other. At the national level, democratic constitutions provide for the resolution of conflicts between different normative worlds, although the focus here is certainly on the protection of autonomies from political encroachment. However, political constitutions make sure that legal orders consider a plurality of normative perspectives. In contrast, international lawmaking can exclusively link to a specific social rationality, lacking any impartial forum for normative reconciliation. This is of special importance for the governance of intellectual resources. The incorporation of international …

Transnational Corporations' Outward Expression Of Inward Self-Constitution: The Enforcement Of Human Rights By Apple, Inc., Larry Cata Backer

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Societal constitutionalism presents us with alternatives to state-centered constitutional theory. But this alternative does not so much displace as extend conventional constitutional theory as a set of static premises that structure the organization of legitimate governance units. Constitutional theory, in either its conventional or societal forms, engages in both a descriptive and a normative project-the former looking to the incarnation of an abstraction and the later to the development of a set of presumptions and principles through which this incarnation can be judged. Constitutional theory is conventionally applied to states-that is, to those manifestations of organized power constituted by a …

Constitutionalization Of Nongovernmental Certification Programs, Jaye Ellis

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Certification programs created by nonstate actors such as the Forest Stewardship Council and Marine Stewardship Council are innovative and potentially highly effective governance initiatives. This article works from the premise that these Councils can be understood as political authorities promulgating law. These Councils, and other actors like them, are generally analyzed from the point of view of governance, which triggers questions about their effectiveness and legitimacy. The approach adopted here shifts the focus to questions of their authority and the validity of the rules, standards, and decision-making processes that they have put in place. The Councils have put in motion …

Social Movements As Constituent Power: The Italian Struggle For The Commons, Saki Bailey, Ugo Mattei

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

The Italian commons (beni comuni) movement is a powerful example of the way in which social movements are emerging as the new pouvoir constituant serving not only to enforce the protections and guarantees of national constitutions but also, in the context of the declining power of the nation-state, as a counter hegemonic force against the neoliberal economic constitutionalism of the international economic institutions. The common goods social movement in Italy was born out of the concerted action of a number of civil society groups combatting neoliberal privatizations. This commons movement, as will be argued in this paper, is an instance …

Dimensions Of Rights Consciousness, Carol J. Greenhouse

Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies

Commenting on David Engel's Article, this Comment responds particularly to Engel's formulation of horizontal and vertical axes as a metaphor for the ways different analytical approaches to law and legal consciousness potentially yield *recombinant interpretive questions. Pursuing Engel's concerns with the embeddedness of local norms and social relations in state-based and global legal processes, this Comment suggests expanding the two dimensions of Engel's matrix to four, so as to highlight the relevance of social distance and temporality in the differing accounts of law he assays, and in appreciating their stakes. In so doing, this Comment situates Engel's essay as a …