In April 2020, I posted on SSRN a proposed draft Voting Rights and Reform Act of 2021, and in August 2020, I posted a set of proposed constitutional amendments to reform the U.S. Supreme Court, the office of the U.S. Attorney General, issues relating to the inability and succession of the...

Constitutions are commonly regarded as uniquely national products, shaped by domestic ideals and politics. This paper develops and empirically tests a novel hypothesis, which is that constitutions are also shaped by transnational influence, or “diffusion.” Constitutional rights can diffuse...

Most of the time, crises precede constitutions. Following a brief review of relevant historical background, this article aims to show why Iceland, after its financial collapse in 2008, is now at last on the road to adopting a new constitution to replace the provisional constitution from 1944....

The United States Constitution has been a document that, during every era, has helped further white supremacy. White supremacy constitutes a “political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white...

In this article, Avi-Yonah argues that the global intangible low-taxed income regime may be an unconstitutional attempt to tax the foreign-source income of foreign entities, and he offers an alternative

The Brazilian Constitution of 1988 gave relatively strong powers to the President. We model and test Executive-Legislative relations in Brazil and demonstrate that Presidents have used pork as a political currency to exchange for votes on policy reforms. In particular Presidents Cardoso and Lula...

This is a review essay of Camila Vergara, Systemic Corruption (Princeton 2020). In this lively and important book, Vergara argues that corruption should be given a structural definition, one that connects corruption with inequality and is plebeian rather than elitist. After surveying the work of...

In this paper, I look at the Afghan Shīʿī communities’ position on the idea of constitutionalism and their vision for a modern constitutional state. Drawing on two draft constitutions that Afghanistan’s most prominent Shīʿī Islamist parties published in the 1990s, I argue that the...

With a new constitutional amendment (Federal Law Gazette I No. 2/2008), Austrian constitutional law has seen its most comprehensive reform since 1945. In particular, the fragmented structure of Austrian constitutional law had previously been seen as a failure of the constitution in its...

This paper investigates the merits of different democratic institutions when politics is unidimensional, when there is uncertainty both about the preferences of the future electorate and the future polarization of political parties, and when politicians have better information about the state of...

In this paper, the introduction of direct-democratic decision-making in all EU decisions is considered when it is feasible without prohibitively increasing decision-making costs. We start with the contractarian argument that each constitution is a contract joining the citizens of a state and...

A major characteristic of the European Union is its transitional or evolving nature, in particular with regard to the assignment of powers between the two main levels of government. More precisely, under current constitutional arrangements, this evolving nature takes the form of an integration...

Die Studie analysiert die (verfassungs-)rechtlichen Möglichkeiten für den Bund unter der Schuldenbremse im Grundgesetz, Investitionen und in diesem Zusammenhang auch Infrastrukturinvestitionen durch Kreditaufnahmen jenseits der für den Bundeshaushalt festgelegten Grenze von strukturell 0,35 %...

Die Studie analysiert die (verfassungs-)rechtlichen Möglichkeiten für den Bund unter der Schuldenbremse im Grundgesetz, Investitionen und in diesem Zusammenhang auch Infrastrukturinvestitionen durch Kreditaufnahmen jenseits der für den Bundeshaushalt festgelegten Grenze von strukturell 0,35 %...

Throughout its history the European integration process has not undermined but rather strengthened the autonomy of Member States vis-à-vis wider societal interests in relation to political economy, labor markets and social provisions. Both the ‘golden age nation state' of the 1960s as well as...

Do-It-Your-Self? – Klimaschutz in die Verfassung -- Kann mit Art. 146 GG eine neue Verfassung in Kraft gesetzt werden? -- Welche Voraussetzungen müssen erfüllt sein, damit ein wirksamer Beschluss im Sinne von Art. 146 GG vorliegt? -- Recht vs. Macht – Wer prüft, ob der Beschluss wirksam...

Citizenship-based taxation (CBT) is the imposition of taxes by a country on income not generated there, or on assets not located there, from an individual who does not live there, only because the individual is defined as a citizen of the country. This essay argues that CBT violates the US...

In the last few years, scholars have sought to revitalize a range of constitutional arguments against mounting economic inequality and in favor of labor rights. They urge contemporary worker movements to lay claim to the Constitution. But worker movements, for the most part, have not done so....

Administrative law rests on two fictions. The first, the nondelegation doctrine, imagines that Congress does not delegate legislative power to agencies. The second, which flows from the first, is that the administrative state thus exercises only executive power, even if that power sometimes...

This paper reviews aspects of the constitution making process in Iceland after the financial collapse of 2008, emphasizing the differences between the provisional constitution of 1944 when Iceland separated unilaterally from Nazi-occupied Denmark and Denmark's 1849 constitution which served,...

This essay revisits the theory of constitutional pluralism. This theory was first developed in the EU context as a way of understanding and defending the absence of a broadly agreed source of final authority in the relationship between national and supranational (EU) legal systems and their...

To understand Iceland's political situation, it is necessary to consider the historical background to the post-crash constitutional revision process launched in 2009. Also, the paper offers a brief account of some aspects of the constitution-making process during 2010-2013, including the work of...

Examples from the breakup of Yugoslavia and state-building in the successor states are used to highlight the political and constitutional choices facing Ukraine. The main lesson is that legitimacy is needed for constitution-building, which is needed for long-term state stability. Ethnic and...

Examples from the breakup of Yugoslavia and state-building in the successor states are used to highlight the political and constitutional choices facing Ukraine. The main lesson is that legitimacy is needed for constitution-building, which is needed for long-term state stability. Ethnic and...

To understand Iceland's political situation, it is necessary to consider the historical background to the post-crash constitutional revision process launched in 2009. Also, the paper offers a brief account of some aspects of the constitution-making process during 2010-2013, including the work of...

In the opinion of many Slovenian and Croatian scholars, the constitutional and legislative design of citizen-initiated referendums in their respective countries was in many ways flawed. Referendums initiated by citizens have caused, at least from the point of view of governments in these two...