Israel's government is rapidly dismantling the separation of powers and expanding its control over the state apparatus. The military response to the attack by Hamas and other armed groups on 7 October 2023 appears to be leading to a permanent reoccupation of the Gaza Strip. The "voluntary"...

Israel's government is rapidly dismantling the separation of powers and expanding its control over the state apparatus. The military response to the attack by Hamas and other armed groups on 7 October 2023 appears to be leading to a permanent reoccupation of the Gaza Strip. The "voluntary"...

A new consensus appears to have emerged among academics and policy practitioners: Governments can be made to respect constitutional rules by establishing and constitutionally entrenching watchdogs, such as anti-corruption commissions, electoral commissions, or ombudspersons. In this article, we...

A new consensus appears to have emerged among academics and policy practitioners: Governments can be made to respect constitutional rules by establishing and constitutionally entrenching watchdogs, such as anti-corruption commissions, electoral commissions, or ombudspersons. In this article, we...

This chapter surveys economic perspectives on the separation of powers, revealing how contemporary research in political economics and the economic analysis of law conceptualize and assess institutional checks on government authority. Emphasizing principal-agent theory, it unpacks how...

Zusammenfassung Die These, dass Verfassungsgerichte, Experten und unabhängige Instanzen die Gesellschaft zunehmend regieren, ist umstritten. Ziel dieses Beitrags ist es nicht, die mögliche empirische Untermauerung dieser Annahme weiter zu prüfen, sondern zunächst zu untersuchen, was diese...

The Russian war of aggression has deepened relations between the EU and Ukraine. This can be seen, above all, in Ukraine's EU candidate status. Despite the war, Ukraine continues to pursue many reforms, even if their pace has slowed since February 2022. The strong concentration of power in the...

Purpose - This paper aims to scrutinize some determinants that affect the functions and roles of contemporary parliaments. In particular, such parliaments attempt to involve in new areas that were not represented in parliamentary study and to play new roles in the areas of development,...

The Russian war of aggression has deepened relations between the EU and Ukraine. This can be seen, above all, in Ukraine’s EU candidate status. Despite the war, Ukraine continues to pursue many reforms, even if their pace has slowed since February 2022. The strong concentration of power in the...

Purpose - This paper aims to scrutinize some determinants that affect the functions and roles of contemporary parliaments. In particular, such parliaments attempt to involve in new areas that were not represented in parliamentary study and to play new roles in the areas of development,...

This Article demonstrates for the first time how civil servants check and restrain presidential power through collective bargaining. The executive branch is typically depicted as a top-down hierarchy. The President, as chief executive, issues directives with vast implications for federal policy....

The rise of independent institutions, particularly central banks, and the increasing significance of the interplay between monetary, fiscal, and financial policies demand a critical reassessment of modern macroeconomic constitutions and their institutional architectures.The paper's core focus...

The administration of Justice is one of the primary functions of the state. The Constitution of Nepal has clearly entrusted the responsibility of the administration of Justice to the Judiciary. The Judiciary is one of the institutions on which rests the noble edifice of democracy and rule of...

De jure judicial independence (JI) is the single most important predictor of de facto JI. In this paper, we describe under what conditions countries are likely to include JI in their constitutions. We describe and analyze both their original choice in this regard as well as change over time...

In 1925, Congress, to provide for the enforcement of certain arbitration agreements, enacted the Federal Arbitration Act ("FAA") as a procedural law to be applicable only in federal courts. However, the United States Supreme Court, seemingly for the purpose of reducing federal courts' caseloads,...

Separation of powers is not an area where courts in a number of common law jurisdictions have displayed a great deal of consistency, and the Hong Kong judiciary proved no exception during the early decades of the Special Administrative Region. Faced with a doctrine enshrined in the Basic Law,...

Plaintiffs must satisfy certain standing requirements before they may bring a civil action in federal court. Typically a plaintiff must have been injured in particular way, the injury was caused by the defendant's conduct, and it is capable of being redressed by the relief granted by the court....

Statutory interpretation is at the cutting edge of legal scholarship and, now, legislative activity. As legislatures have increasingly begun to perceive judges as activist meddlers, some legislatures have found a creative solution to the perceived control problem: statutory directives. Statutory...

This chapter generally concerns how elements of liberal democratic constitutional discourse have functioned to normalize emergency and possible state of exception governance during the COVID-19 pandemic. More specifically, the chapter focuses on the transference of legislative power to the...

How should society allocate policy-making between the legislative and the executive branches of government? We analyze a model in which biased and polarized policymakers set policy in response to shocks. We show that policy issues for which the policy-maker bias is small relative to the degree...

An independent judiciary has often been hailed as one of the most important aspects of the rule of law. Securing judicial independence (JI) via explicit constitutional rules seems straightforward and there is evidence that de jure and de facto JI are linked, at least in the long term. However,...

In this paper we present historical evidence and a theoretical analysis of the origins of political stability and instability in Colombia for the period 1850-1950, and their relationship to political, particularly electoral, institutions. We show that the driving force behind institutional...

Hayek (1960) distinguishes the institutions of English freedom, which guarantee the independence of judges from political interference in the administration of justice, from those of American freedom, which allow judges to restrain law-making powers of the sovereign through constitutional...

Beyond a shared understanding that regulating cyber is complex, the role the state plays in this domain has thus far eluded systemic analysis. This Article addresses this gap by offering a working definition of “cyber” and proceeds unearthing the polycentric roles and functions performed by...

Modern courts and commentators have had trouble distinguishing the kinds of decisions that require “judicial” power from the adjudicative tasks that Congress can authorize administrative agencies to perform in the course of “executing” federal law. In a prior article ("Adjudication in...

A country’s form of government has important economic and political consequences, but the determinants that lead countries to choose either parliamentary or presidential systems are largely unexplored. This paper studies this choice by analyzing the factors that make countries switch from...

The majority of theoretical and empirical studies on the relationship between decentralization and corruption argues that the devolution of power might be a feasible instrument to keep corruption at bay. We argue that this result crucially depends on the effectiveness of monitoring...

This paper deals with judicial departures in consolidating democracies. It investigates to what extent and under what conditions judges in those contexts are not able to decide on their departures themselves but are rather forced to leave due to pressure from the elected branches. We undertook a...

This paper formalizes the principle that persecution power of government may generate violent contests over it. We show that this principle yields a large set of theoretical insights on different separation-of-powers institutions that can help to preempt such contests under different...

Regime changes toward autocracy typically reshape the judicial framework, effectively eroding the separation of powers and leading the nation toward an autocratic path. Recent instances of regime shift in Hungary, Poland, and Turkey offer templates of democratic erosion through manipulation and...

As presidents make ever more expansive claims of executive power, Congress's ability and willingness to counter the executive is limited. That makes all the more significant instances when Congress does overcome structural and political challenges to pass legislation to rein in the President....

The rule of law and judicial independence are a project yet to be achieved in Mozambique. The different attempts made so far to reform the legal system, mainly after the change in political and strategic direction brought about by the Constitution of 1990, were always short-sighted and...

Personal freedom is highly valued by many and a central element of liberal political philosophy. Although personal freedom is frequently associated with electoral democracy, developments in countries such as Hungary, Poland, Turkey and Russia, where elected populist leaders with authoritarian...