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Considerations Of History And Purpose In Constitutional Borrowing, Robert L. Tsai

Faculty Scholarship

This essay is part of a symposium issue dedicated to "Constitutional Rights: Intersections, Synergies, and Conflicts" at William and Mary School of Law. I make four points. First, perfect harmony among rights might not always be normatively desirable. In fact, in some instances, such as when First Amendment and Second Amendment rights clash, we might wish to have expressive rights consistently trump gun rights. Second, we can't resolve clashes between rights in the abstract but instead must consult history in a broadly relevant rather than a narrowly "originalist" fashion. When we do so, we learn that armed expression and white …

A Tradition At War With Itself: A Reply To Professor Rana's Review Of America's Forgotten Constitutions: Defiant Visions Of Power And Community, Robert Tsai

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This essay responds to Professor Aziz Rana's review essay, "The Many American Constitutions," 93 Texas Law Review 1193 (2015).

He contends: (1) my portrayal of American constitutionalism might contain a “hidden” teleological understanding of the development of constitutional law; (2) my notion of "conventional sovereignty" sometimes seems content-free and at other times "interlinked with liberal egalitarianism"; and (3) a focus on failed constitutions "inadvertently tends to compartmentalize the overall tradition."

I answer in the following ways: (1) I reject any sense that constitutional law has moved in an arc of steady progress toward Enlightenment and instead embrace a tradition of …

Constituting Vanuatu: Societal, Legal And Local Perspectives,, Benedict Sheehy, Jackson Maogoto

Benedict Sheehy

Governance in Vanuatu has been a source of concern for Australia as it forms part of Australia’s ‘Arc of Instability.’ Vanuatu has adopted a modified Westminster system as that system is often advocated as the model for constitutions and governance around the world. In various former colonies local populations were expected to simply absorb its liberal democratic principles apparently on some assumption that such principles were an innate part of human nature. Most readings of history would come to a different conclusion. Vanuatu illustrates this error and the complexities of a society that not only creates a broad challenge for …

Judgments Of The United States Supreme Court And The South African Constitutional Court As A Basis For A Universal Method To Resolve Conflicts Between Fundamental Rights, Daniel H. Erskine

Daniel H. Erskine

This article describes the methods utilized by the United States Supreme Court to resolve specific cases involving conflicts between federal constitutional rights, a federal constitutional right and a state constitutional or statutory right, and an international treaty right and a federal constitutional right. Consideration of particular decisions representative of the manner the Court resolves conflicts between rights in the three typologies described above, illustrates how the Court views such conflicts and the rationales employed to resolve apparent conflicting rights. The rationales used by the United States Supreme Court are compared to the South African Constitutional Court’s decisions in the Soobramoney, …

A Complete Property Right Amendment, John H. Ryskamp

ExpressO

The trend of the eminent domain reform and "Kelo plus" initiatives is toward a comprehensive Constitutional property right incorporating the elements of level of review, nature of government action, and extent of compensation. This article contains a draft amendment which reflects these concerns.

Canadian Fundamental Justice And American Due Process: Two Models For A Guarantee Of Basic Adjudicative Fairness, David M. Siegel

ExpressO

This paper traces how the Supreme Courts of Canada and the United States have each used the basic guarantee of adjudicative fairness in their respective constitutions to effect revolutions in their countries’ criminal justice systems, through two different jurisprudential models for this development. It identifies a relationship between two core constitutional structures, the basic guarantee and enumerated rights, and shows how this relationship can affect the degree to which entrenched constitutional rights actually protect individuals. It explains that the different models for the relationship between the basic guarantee and enumerated rights adopted in Canada and the United States, an “expansive …

The Recognition And Enforcement Of Foreign Equitable Remedies And Other Types Of Non-Money Judgments In United States And French Courts: A Comparative Analysis, Noele Sophie Rigot

LLM Theses and Essays

Courts of industrialized nations are often faced with adjudication of cases which involve foreign components. It is common for those courts to be asked by individuals or legal entities from a transnational environment to adjudicate with regard to some elements already adjudged in a different legal system as if it were a local judgment. The question that arises is how effects should be given when dealing with prior adjudications. Most countries agree to recognize some effects determined by foreign jurisdictions, as long as those determinations meet standards that guarantee proper integration of the foreign decision into the domestic setting. These …

Judicial Review In Europe, Gottfried Dietze

Michigan Law Review

The years following the Second World War witnessed a wave of constitution making in Europe. In East and West alike, popular government was instituted through new basic laws. But whereas the constitutions of Eastern Europe established a Rousseauistic form. of democracy through the creation of an omnipotent legislature, those of the West, while reflecting a belief in parliamentary government, to a larger or smaller degree limited the power of the legislature through the introduction of judicial review. This acceptance of judicial review can be attributed mainly to two factors. It sprung from a distrust of a parliamentarism under which, during …

Sociological Interpretation Of Law, Joseph H. Drake

Articles

It is not the purpose of this paper to essay a definition of either of the formidable words in the title. The object is rather to call attention away from the metaphysical question, what is law? to the sociological question, how may we best attain justice in the administration of law? and, by the aid of some examples from history and comparative law, to justify as legal and constitutional the sociological method of interpretation. That such justification is necessary is evident from the fact that although the dictum of Mr. Justice. HOLMES in the dissenting opinion in Lochner v. New …