Die aktuelle Schuldenbremse verhindert notwendige Zukunftsinvestitionen. Dieser Beitrag enthält einen pragmatischen Änderungsvorschlag des Artikel 109 Abs. 3 GG, der im Kern für einen Übergang von der kameralen Betrachtung der Einnahmen und Ausgaben zur kaufmännischen Betrachtung als...

This study was commissioned by the European Parliament's Policy Department for Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the AFCO Committee. It examines the evolving role of the European Council in the EU's constitutional structure. As the study demonstrates, the increasing...

This study was commissioned by the European Parliament's Policy Department for Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the AFCO Committee. It examines the evolving role of the European Council in the EU's constitutional structure. As the study demonstrates, the increasing...

This study was commissioned by the European Parliament's Policy Department for Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the AFCO Committee. It examines the evolving role of the European Council in the EU's constitutional structure. As the study demonstrates, the increasing...

This study was commissioned by the European Parliament's Policy Department for Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the AFCO Committee. It examines the evolving role of the European Council in the EU's constitutional structure. As the study demonstrates, the increasing...

On 24 March 2024, presidential elections were held in Senegal, with opposition politician Bassirou Diomaye Diakhar Faye, who was 43 at the time, emerging as the winner. On 2 April 2024, he was sworn in as the fifth President of the Republic of Senegal. This event may mark a turning point in the...

The different theoretical constructions around the conceptualizations of Buen Vivir and decolonial feminisms have been the subject of fervent debate at the beginning of the governmental periods of Evo Morales in Bolivia (2006 - 2019) and Rafael Correa in Ecuador (2007 - 2017) when Constitutional...

The paper discusses a broader tendency towards participatory citizenship as an intrinsic part of a wider development of rethinking democracy. The focus is on participation in constitutional reform - as a core dimension of reimagining democracy - in a variety of manifestations and intensities. It...

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...

We use Comparative Constitutions Project (CCP) data to explore whether Constitutions that follow revolutions are designed differently. We employ matching methods using 31 treatments (revolutionary Constitutions) and 162 control units (new Constitutional adoptions without a revolution). We find...

In contemporary constitutional jurisprudence, capacious notions of individual liberty are ascendant. Under the First Amendment, due process, takings, nondelegation, and a range of interpretive doctrines, advocates are seeking greater respect for individual liberty, and greater constitutional...

In The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Foundations of American Democracy (2022), Joey Fishkin and William E. Forbath seek a restoration to American politics of a coupling of political-cultural dispositions long in evidence here but recently gone out of style: for a casting of...

This short essay argues that the congruence and proportionality test of City of Boerne v. Flores—which the U.S. Supreme Court applies to laws passed pursuant to Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment—should not apply to federal voting rights legislation. This test is inapplicable because the...

Constitutional loyalty, the importance ascribed to complying with constitutional rules, is difficult to measure across countries due to differences in context, history, and culture. We overcome this challenge by exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic as an ideal setting in which societies around the...

An address to a meeting in Dunedin introducing A Constitution for Aotearoa New Zealand on 30 November 2016. The address makes the case for a written constitution in the light of concerning trends overseas, such as the rise of the “post-truth” age in Donald Trump’s United States and the...

The keynote address to the Open Source/Open Society Conference, delivered on 22 August 2016. The address introduces Sir Geoffrey Palmer and Dr Andrew Butler’s new book, A Constitution for Aotearoa New Zealand, and discusses the shortcomings of New Zealand’s unwritten constitution

Over the past three decades, the Supreme Court has led a historicist revolution in equity jurisprudence. In a series of decisions known as the “new equity” cases, the Court has sought to limit federal equitable remedies to the forms of relief typically issued by the English Court of Chancery...

For a long time, a key condition for Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) to entry into force was the implementation of the European Court for Human Rights (ECtHR) in the case of Sejdić-Finci v Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) and Zornić v B&H. According to the judgment of the ECtHR, the...

A stable core-shell structure with Ih symmetry, Au 12 @Au 30 , has been investigated by first-principles calculations. The stability of the core-shell Au 42 structure is evaluated by vibrational frequency analysis and molecular dynamics simulations. Analysis of the adaptive natural density...

"This Introduction summarizes the contents and explains the methodology of the book and of its main policy conclusions on how constitutional democracies should respond to the increasing governance failures inside and beyond states. All UN member states have employed constitutional law for...

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...

The citizen assembly of the Swiss canton Glarus decided to radically reduce the historical number of communes from 25 to three. Studies show that the financial and economic consequences are surprisingly small. This paper analyzes the effects on citizens’ vote participation as an indicator of...

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...

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

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 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...

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed an unprecedented governance challenge, with governments resorting to very different (legal) strategies to respond to the health emergency. A rich literature is already dedicated to measures adopted in individual States. This article adds an original comparative...

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...

The original constitution of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) rested on a neoliberal approach to interstate federalism à la Hayek. This approach appealed to political elites at the time of the Maastricht Treaty, promising to overcome the so-called ‘crisis of governability’ of the 1970s and...

The threat of climate change demands far-reaching, systematic changes to the global economy—and similar changes to how governments around the world set environmental policies. In recent years, many environmental policymakers have developed plans to “decarbonize” the economy. These plans...

On January 27, 2020, Virginia became the thirty-eighth state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Yet despite having met the amending requirements of Article V, the Twenty-Eighth Amendment has not been promulgated by the National Archivist, as required by federal statute. The ERA remains...

Tsebelis and Nardi (2016) and Tsebelis (2017) report that constitutional length correlates with lower levels of GDP per capita. They argue that this may be the case because longer constitutions lead to greater corruption. However, uncovering a causal relationship between constitutional length...

Do citizens legislate different tax policies than parliaments? We provide quasi-experimental evidence for causal effects of direct democracy. Town meetings (popular assemblies) replace local councils in small German municipalities below a specific population threshold. Difference-in-differences,...

This paper reports recent events in Iceland where the political agents of oligarchs didn‘t even bother to try to influence, let alone contest, a national referendum on a new constitution because, if they didn‘t like the result, they would simply find ways to nullify the outcome ex post. The...

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....

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...

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...

The traditional school of economic policy analysis predicts that globalisation will give rise to predatory competition between the governments of the European nation states. The consequence is anticipated to be a marked reduction in, if not the destruction of, the benevolent Welfare State. The...

Differentiated integration has becomes a pervasive feature of the EU legal and political reality. It happens when legal rules are not uniformly valid across the EU Member States. This report explores to what extent regimes of differentiated integration are compatible with EU constitutional...