Suchergebnisse

The Constitution was designed to limit government power and protect individuals from the tyranny of majorities and interest-group politics. But those protections are meaningless without judges who are fully committed to enforcing them, and America's judges have largely abdicated that responsibility. All too often, instead of judging the constitutionality of government action, courts simply rationalize it, as the Supreme Court did in upholding the Affordable Care Act, which represented the largest?and most blatantly unconstitutional?expansion of federal power since the New Deal.T

Constitutional rights protect individuals "vertically" against government overreach, but may also regulate legal relations "horizontally" among private parties in most legal systems. In every constitutional system with judicially enforceable constitutional rights, courts must make choices about whether, when, and how to give those rights horizontal effect. This book is about those choices and their consequences. It offers three case studies, of Germany, the United States, and Canada, showing how the choices courts make about horizontal rights reflect existing normative and political realities and, over time, help to shape new ones.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title -- Copyright -- Table of Contents -- Preface -- List of Abbreviations -- 1 Introduction -- Overview -- Scope of this book -- Modus operandi of unconstitutional usurpation of power -- Judges' roles in unconstitutional usurpation of power -- Practical challenges -- Methodological and related normative questions -- 2 Legal bases to assess the lawfulness of unconstitutional usurpation of power -- Legal bases used to validate coups -- Legal bases used to invalidate coups -- Concluding remarks -- 3 Permissible parameters for judges in post-coup suppression of fundamental rights and freedoms -- International conventions and rules of customary international law on the protection of fundamental rights and freedoms -- States of emergency and derogation of fundamental rights and freedoms -- Military tribunals -- Law enforcement measures -- Refusal to render judgments on 'political questions' -- Concluding remarks -- 4 Availability or non-availability of defences for judges in relation to judicial responsibility post-coups -- Individual criminal responsibility arising from judges' roles in an oppressive regime -- Independence of judiciary and allegiance to the new 'constitutional' order -- Superior orders -- Duress -- Judicial immunity -- Concluding remarks -- 5 Amnesties, pardons, immunities and other restrictions on the prosecution of usurpers of power and their accomplices or collaborators -- Amnesties, pardons and immunities -- Statutes of limitations -- Transitional justice -- A right balance -- Concluding remarks -- 6 International or extra-territorial criminal prosecution of coups-related crimes of international concern -- Prosecution before the International Criminal Court, ad hoc international tribunals and hybrid courts -- Prosecution in foreign courts exercising universal jurisdiction -- 7 Epilogue -- Index.

Impact of the dominant political party on the US Supreme Court, 1828-1990.

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. A Republican Constitution -- 2. The Politics of Obligation -- 3. Madison's Judges -- 4. The Antipolitical Constitution -- 5. Cases and Controversies -- Notes -- Index -- Back Cover.

Constitutional rights protect individuals against government overreaching, but that is not all they do. In different ways and to different degrees, constitutional rights also regulate legal relations among private parties in most legal systems. In other words, rights can have not only a vertical effect, within the hierarchical relationship between citizen and state, but also a horizontal one, on the citizen-to-citizen relationships otherwise governed by private law. In every constitutional system with judicially enforceable constitutional rights, courts must make choices about whether, when, and how to give those rights horizontal effect. This text is about how different courts make those choices, and about the consequences that they have.

Preliminary Material -- Wer soll Hüter der Verfassung sein? -- Rechtsstellung eines Verfassungsgerichts -- Ein Verfassungsgericht als maßgeblicher Letztinterpret der Verfassung -- Verfassungsgerichtsbarkeit und Fachgerichtsbarkeit -- Verfassungsgerichtsbarkeit in einem föderativen Staat -- Kontinuität der Verfassung(srechtsprechung) -- Anmerkungen -- Schönburger Gespräche zu Recht und Staat.

While the majority of the landmark laws and legal precedents expanding access to justice in the United States remain intact, less than 2 percent of civil cases are decided by a trial today. What explains this phenomenon, and why it is so difficult to get one's day in court? This book examines the sustained efforts of political and legal actors to scale back access to the courts in the decades since it was expanded, largely in the service of the rights revolution of the 1950s and 60s.

More and more environmental cases are being heard and decided by international courts and tribunals which lack special environmental competence. This situation raises fundamental questions of legitimacy of the environmental practice of international courts. This book addresses inter alia questions of who has legal standing to bring an environmental claim before an international court, on which legal norms is the case decided and whether judges have the necessary expertise to adjudicate environmental cases of often complex nature. It analyses which challenges international courts face, which possibilities they have and which advances international judicial practice has been able to make in protecting the environment. Through the prism of legitimacy important insights emerge as to whether international courts and tribunals are fit for addressing some of the most pressing global challenges of our time.