Suchergebnisse

"The Commission traces the historical development of constitutional and statutory restrictions on local property and nonproperty taxes, describes the pertinent legal provisions in the several States and respectfully submits to Governors and State Legislatures a number of guidelines for improving the ability of local governments to meet local revenue needs through the ta:xation of local resources"--Preface, page

Over the last twenty years, a substantial and increasing percentage of public school students have been required to wear school uniforms or adhere to strict dress codes. They have done so in a cultural and legal landscape that assumes such restrictions pose few—if any—constitutional problems. As this Article argues, however, this landscape is relatively new; as recently as forty years ago, the legal and cultural assumptions about student dress codes were completely reversed, with the majority of educators and commentators assuming that our constitutional commitments to equality, autonomy, and free expression preclude strict student dress restrictions. This Article explores the history of this evolution as a case study in the messy process through which constitutional law interacts with politics and culture, at times developing without significant judicial reflection or, indeed, participation. Major cultural developments in parenting, schooling, policing, gender, and race relations interacted with shifting political dynamics and economic factors to change our frames and alter public and judicial perception of the scope of underlying constitutional rights. In this Article, we explain these previously obscured changes in constitutional law and culture, explore their implications for constitutional theory, and argue for their reversal. While the underlying constitutional case law is sufficiently indeterminate to support either era's approach, the approach we reconstruct in this Article better serves our children and our constitutional values.

The democratic community has faced a challenge regarding the existence or absence of a legal basis for the introduction of compulsory vaccination. The scholars asked the question: Is compulsory vaccination against COVID-19 a violation of personal non-property human rights or the implementation by the state of its duty to ensure the sanitary and epidemiological well-being of the entire population and protect society from a deadly disease? Methodology of work: logical-semantic, historical, analytical, extrapolation, comparative legal methods, methods of comparison and generalization, analysis, and synthesis. Results of the study: the assessment of the historical and international experience in the implementation of vaccination was carried out; the negative and positive aspects of mass vaccination were considered; the legal regulation of vaccination was studied; the legal framework in this area was compared; the judicial practice regarding legal relations that arise during vaccination was analyzed. The conclusion is made regarding priority in the context of the increasing spread of COVID-19, the observance of which rights is key during the mandatory mass vaccination (the right to a high-quality, highly effective vaccine, the right to choose a vaccine, equal availability of a vaccine, the right to receive compensation in case of negative consequences after vaccination, etc.).

This paper studies how to protect future generations from expropriation and to induce optimal investment in intergenerational public goods (IPGs), by introducing constitutional restrictions on the tax base. The type of tax-base restrictions that we consider places limits on the tax instruments that the government can use to raise revenue, but not on the level of expenditures or debt. We show that the introduction of a constitutional amendment requiring that IPGs and debt be financed with land taxes makes intergenerational expropriation impossible and, for many cases of interest, induces optimal investment in IPGs. We also show that a weaker constitutional amendment requiring that IPGs be financed with land taxes, but imposing no restrictions on how to finance the debt, has a positive impact on IPGs, but not on expropriation. The paper also studies the political feasibility of these reforms. We show that the first reform is not politically feasible since it hurts current generations, but the weaker reform can induce a Pareto improvement.

The article is devoted to determining the place of the right to information in the system of communicative freedoms, specifying the scope of constitutional protection and clarifying the criteria for its restriction. During the research a wide range of general scientific and special-legal methods of scientific knowledge was used, in particular: logical, historical, comparative-legal and system-structural methods of research. The analysis of domestic and German legal literature on the right to information was important for achieving the goal of the study. The study of the decisions of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine and the decisions of the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany devoted to the interpretation of this fundamental human right was of particular cognitive importance. As a result of the study, the author states that the right to information belongs to the system of communicative freedoms. As a separate communicative freedom, it actively interacts with other freedoms, such as freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of cinema, and so on. At the same time, the right to information is subordinated to the general goal of communicative freedoms – to be an instrument of communication of an individual with society, a real opportunity to express and convey his views, beliefs and opinions to other individuals. The right to information protects access to public information not by a particular group of individuals, but by the corresponding right of each individual. In addition, this right should not be construed as a right to restrict access to certain information. Given this, the scope of protection of the right to information is to protect the right of everyone to access information that is in publicly available sources of information. Such information is the source for forming the views and beliefs of individuals. The appropriate approach should be reflected in the following interpretative acts of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine on the interpretation of the right to information. This fundamental human right may be restricted. However, such interference in the exercise of this right of individuals should not turn into its complete leveling, turning it into fiction. Therefore, along with the purely normative grounds for restricting the right to information, additional criteria are defined according to which each individual case of restriction of this right of individuals must be assessed. Keywords: information, communication freedom, human rights, sphere of protection, restriction of human rights

The Supreme Court has repeatedly noted that ballot and election regulations raise difficult questions about the interplay between the First Amendment's heightened protection for political speech, and states' need to regulate ballots and elections to ensure fair and orderly democracy. When making the delicate judgments between protecting political speech and allowing states to regulate elections, the Court has traditionally stated precisely which test it was employing to evaluate individual restrictions. Last Term, in Buckley v. American Constitutional Law Foundation, the Court invalidated several of Colorado's restrictions on the signature-gathering process for ballot initiative petitions. In so doing, the Court failed to identify which level of scrutiny it was applying for each of the restrictions in question and relied instead on certain unreviewed restrictions to render unconstitutional the specific regulations before it. The lack of clarity in the resulting opinion will make it difficult for lawmakers, lower courts, and the Court to create and evaluate election regulations.

The power to incur public debts is one which may have a vital influence on all governmental services. Since borrowing is often the easy way out of a difficult financial situation, the state's credit must be jealously guarded against abuse by the unscrupulous, the inefficient, and the over-ambitious. As a result of their experiences during the nineteenth century, most of the states in this country placed constitutional restrictions upon the use of the state's credit. But despite limitations many states have contracted large debts during the past twenty years, and several of them have been embarrassed by debt problems.