Law Commons^™

The Right Of Public Participation In The Law-Making Process And The Role Of The Legislature In The Promotion Of This Right, Karen Czapanskiy, Rashida Manjoo

Karen Czapanskiy

In 2006, the South African Constitutional Court found a constitutional right to participate in the legislative process in the case of Doctors for Life, Case CCT 12/05 (decided 17 August 2006). In this article, we argue that, first, legislation is better when legislators are required to invite and attend to public input, and, second, citizenship is better when legislators are required to invite and attend to public input. Doctors for Life puts South Africa on the road to improving both legislation and citizenship. In the United States, this road is largely untraveled. While rejecting traditional representative democracy as an adequate …

Balancing Competing Individual Constitutional Rights: Raising Some Questions, Taunya Banks

Taunya Lovell Banks

Despite increasing support for global human rights ..., some scholars and constitutional democracies, like the United States, continue to resist constitutionalizing socio-economic rights. Socio-economic rights, unlike political and civil constitutional rights that usually prohibit government actions, are thought to impose positive obligations on government. As a result, constitutionalizing socio-economic rights raises questions about separation of powers and the competence of courts to decide traditionally legislative and executive matters. ... [W]hen transitional democracies, like South Africa, choose to constitutionalize socio-economic rights, courts inevitably must grapple with their role in the realization of those rights.... Two questions immediately come to mind: (1) …

Sovereignty As Discourse, Robert Tsai

Robert L Tsai

This is a review of Howard Schweber's book, "The Language of Liberal Constitutionalism" (Cambridge University Press, 2007). Schweber argues that "the creation of a legitimate constitutional regime depends on a prior commitment to employ constitutional language, and that such a commitment is both the necessary and sufficient condition for constitution making." I critique the power and limits of this reformulated Lockean thesis, as well as Schweber's secondary claims that, for constitutional language to remain legitimate, it must increasingly become autonomous, specialized, and secular.

In The Cause Of Union Democracy, Michael J. Goldberg

Michael J Goldberg

This article is part of a symposium entitled "The Employment and Labor Law Professor as Public Intellectual: Sharing our Work with the World," based on presentations at the 2008 meeting of the Association of American Law Schools. The article describes the cause to which I have devoted a good part of my career, both inside and outside the halls of academia: the struggle to make the labor movement more democratic and more responsive to its members. While this piece briefly describes how I became involved in this cause, and how my work on its behalf has contributed to both my …

Authorizing Subnational Constitutions In Transitional Federal States: South Africa, Democracy, And The Kwazulu- Natal Constitution, Jonathan Marshfield

Jonathan Marshfield

Secrecy And Democratic Decisions, Mark A. Chinen

Mark A. Chinen

Secrecy to protect intelligence sources and methods appears often in the nation’s discourse about controversial national security matters. Often it is asked whether such secrecy is consistent with the nation’s democratic principles and processes. I argue such principles and processes provide a framework through which we try to answer questions about secrecy and indeed legitimate them, but are often too broad to provide definitive guidance in specific cases. At the same time, the sources and methods argument itself is overbroad because of the nature of the sources and methods themselves; the tentative nature of intelligence assessments derived from those sources …

Gunneflo - Demokrati Och Lagprövning: Om Rättfärdigandet Av En Positiv Respektive Negativ Inställning Till Lagprövning [Democracy And Judicial Review: On The Justicfication Of A Positive And A Negative Attitude To Judicial Review In A Democracy], Markus Gunneflo

Markus Gunneflo