Suchergebnisse

We present an instructional strategy called Challenging Constitutional Rights, in which high school civics students critically interacted with, and interpreted, constitutional rights. As an alternative assessment project, students used technologies to make visual and oral presentations on the relationship between a current event and a right detailed in an amendment to the U.S. constitution. In this article, we describe the process of the project, detail the strengths of the project organized around the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) Vision of powerful teaching and learning, and conclude with reflections from the teacher who designed and implemented this project. Exemplars of student work are included.

This paper analyses the health-improving effects of introducing four different constitutional social and environmental human rights (health, free education, adequate living (or welfare), and environment) and the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR) into national constitution and jurisprudence in Latin America, where human rights litigations are particularly active. By using retrospective fertility surveys conducted in 15 Latin American countries from the Demographic and Health Surveys, I compare the survival of infants born to the same mother before and after the introduction of four different constitutional human rights and the ACHR. This is to disentangle the effects of these rights from changes in other country-level characteristics. The major results are as follows. (1) No constitutional social and environmental rights significantly change the total amount and composition of government spending. (2) Introducing a right to health into the national constitution is associated with a 2.6 per cent subsequent reduction in infant deaths among poor mothers, but not associated with infant deaths among the general population. (3) The right to education, welfare, and environment and the ratification of the ACHR are not associated with a subsequent reduction in infant deaths. (4) The effects of a right to health are robust after allowing for total government spending and its composition (health, education, and social security and welfare spending), which indicates that the allocation of government health spending - rather than an absolute amount of spending induced by the constitutional right to health - might be important to reduce infant deaths among poor mothers.

Part One: Constitutionalism beyond the State -- 1: Constitutionalism in an Age of Globalisation -- 2: Globalisation and the Reconfiguration of Political Power -- Part Two: Rights Constitutionalism and the Challenge of Legal Pluralism -- 3: The Paradigmatic Debate: Liberal Legalism and Legal Pluralism -- 4: Internal Legal Pluralism and the Interpretive Question -- 5: External Legal Pluralism and the Instrumental Question -- Part Three: Constitutional Rights in an Age of Globalisation: Towards a Legal Pluralist Theory of Constitutionalism -- 6: Legal Pluralism and the Politics of Constitutional Definition -- 7: Rights Constitutionalism and the Counterhegemonic Difficulty -- Conclusion: Towards a Legal Pluralist Constitutionalism

"This book is the first collection of its kind exploring common law constitutional rights. It offers a detailed and comparative analysis of the content and role of individual common law constitutional rights in judicial decision-making; and a series of essays offering a range of perspectives on the constitutional significance and rights implications of this development. There is a developing body of legal reasoning in the United Kingdom Supreme Court that has championed common law constitutional rights. Indeed various members of the senior judiciary have asserted the primary role of common law constitutional rights and critiqued legal arguments based first and foremost on the Human Rights Act 1998. This shift in legal reasoning has created a sense amongst both scholars and the judiciary that something significant is happening here, and was recently described by Lady Hale as 'UK constitutionalism on the march'. This collection brings together leading constitutional scholars to analyse this significant development for the first time"--

THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES THE CONTEMPORARY CONTROVERSY OVER CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATION AND THE DIFFERING UNDERSTANDINGS OF CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS THAT UNDERLIE IT. THE AUTHOR FIRST CONSIDERS THE CHARACTER AND BASIS FOR INTERPRETIVISM, THAT IS, A JURISPRUDENCE THAT DELINEATES RIGHTS BY REFERENCE TO THE INTENT OF THE FOUNDER AND TO THE CONSTITUTIONAL TEXT. NEXT, THE AUTHOR REVIEWS THE NON-INTERPRETIVIST ALTERNATIVE, FOCUSING ON RICHARD DWORKIN'S INFLUENTIAL ACCOUNT OF CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS. THE AUTHOR CONCLUDES THAT DESPITE ITS STRENGTHS, DWORKIN'S POSITION DOES JUSTICE NEITHER TO THE CONSTITUTIONAL TEXT NOR TO THE CONNECTION BETWEEN STRUCTURE AND RIGHTS IN THE UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION. CONSIDERING CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY FROM THE BROADER PERSPECTIVE OF STATE CONSTITUTIONALISM, THE AUTHOR CONCLUDES THAT ITS INSIGHTS ARE LIMITED TO THE U.S. CONSTITUTION AND OFFERS SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR A MORE ADEQUATE CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY.