Kategoria BISAC: Law >> Constitutional

Bringing a postcolonial perspective to UK constitutional debates and including a detailed and comparative engagement with the constitutions of Britain's ex-colonies, this book is an original reflection upon the relationship between the written and the unwritten constitution.

Can a nation have an unwritten constitution? While written constitutions both found and define modern nations, Britain is commonly regarded as one of the very few exceptions to this rule. Drawing on a range of theories concerning writing, law and violence (from Robert Cover to Jacques Derrida), Constitutions...

This book provides a detailed examination of the complex negotiation processes surrounding intergovernmental conferences in the European Union.

Since the Treaty of Amsterdam (1997) and its 'appendix', the Treaty of Nice in 2002, any reform of the treaty framework of the European Union seems to be doomed to fail, evidenced by the decline of the Constitutional Treaty and by the current fate of the Lisbon treaty. By presenting an extensive quantitative study of the Intergovernmental Conference of 1996/7 prior to the Treaty of Amsterdam, the authors argue that these...

This book examines administrative law in Asia, exploring the profound changes in the legal regimes of many Asian states that have taken place in recent years. Political democratization in some countries, economic change more broadly and the forces of globalization have put pressure on the developmental state model, wherein bureaucrats governed in a kind of managed capitalism and public-private partnerships were central. In their stead, a more market-oriented regulatory state model seems to be emerging in many jurisdictions, with emphases on transparency, publicity, and constrained...

Race, as this book demonstrates, has been a factor in the Constitution's framing, ratification, and development. Examined specifically and in detail are: * the accommodation of slavery to create a viable republic; * the Union's experience with and eventual undoing by slavery; * reconstruction of the nation pursuant to seminal principles of racial equality; * persisting efforts to limit or defeat constitutional provisions for equality and opportunity; * the desegregation mandate and its devolution; and * modern problems in accounting for a legacy of racial discrimination and disadvantage....

This work provides a philosophical framework within which the free speech clause of the Constitution's First Amendment may be understood. While much has been written on the First Amendment, this work is unique in offering an historically based thesis illuminating a point virtually ignored in the literature--the absolutist quality of the free speech clause and the philosophical dualism (words/deeds) on which it is based. Given the increasingly powerful forces favoring group rights in order to generate laws which would silence offensive speech, this book provides a radical challenge to the...

There is almost no political question in the United States, wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, that is not resolved sooner or later into a judicial question. The U.S. Supreme Court is the ultimate arbiter of judicial questions, weighing the laws enacted by the people's representatives against the inviolable fundamental law embodied in the U.S. Constitution. Virtually every vital political and social issue comes before the Court: abortion, affirmative action, capital punishment, elections and voting, gay rights, gun control, separation of church and state, and more. This book presents living law,...

"Freedom of Association: Rights and Liberties under the Law" chronicles the evolution of a right derived from but not granted in the First Amendment--freedom of association. An opening analysis of the Supreme Court's ruling against a gay adult member of the Boy Scouts of America illustrates the range and complexity of this issue.

Historical discussions of colonial America, including the British Parliament's efforts to suppress political associations, set the stage for a careful scrutiny of the political and legislative activities of the 1950s and 1960s when the Supreme Court established...