Bringing the State into Constitutional Theory: Public Authority and the Constitution

This article brings the state into constitutional theory by presenting a theory of the development of the American state from the late 19th century to the present. The focus of the theory is the ability of the national state to exercise sovereignty or public authority over civil society. The main thesis is that the Constitution did not establish a government with a level of public authority adequate to the requirements of a modem democratic state. The result was a mismatch between the demands of civil society and the competence of state institutions, causing a reorganization of the political institutions of civil society in the early 20th century and a crisis of public authority in the 1960s. The United States continues to experience the consequences of an imbalance between the state institutions established by an 18th-century constitution and 20th-century democratic politics.     

全球化背景下的国家与公民

随着“人和公民的权利—国家权力”范式在启蒙时代的建立 ,民族国家与公民开始发生一种“直接面对面”的联系 ,民族国家循着“权利”和“形式法律”之名日渐深入到公民生活的方方面面。在全球化背景下 ,这一格局受到了挑战。国家与公民的直接联系为社会权力中介所隔断、全球精英游离于国家权力之外、公民依凭世界性力量反对国家等情况在一定程度上打破了民族国家与公民“直接面对面”的模式 ,同时 ,这些新变化和新趋势也为现代社会走出“日常生活的国家殖民化”提供了机遇和可能     

The State of Freedom in Europe

The reaction to 11 September damaged the liberty of those living in Europe who found themselves targeted as suspect terrorists while seeming to do little to ensure the security of the wider community. More recently a second emergency, rooted this time in the financial and economic collapse of 2008 onwards, has caused a further unravelling of Europe's constitutional project, even threatening the gains of past generations of European idealists. In today's Europe universal liberty and security have no meaning for many even if their shape is retained in structures that in truth mock rather than deliver democracy and human rights. This article traces the origins of the crises that have afflicted so directly the breadth of liberty and human security in the Union, demonstrating their roots in ‘viruses’ that have been present from the start of the European movement but which have now spiralled out of control. The essay ends by asking what can be done to prevent the full decline of the region into a state of neo‐democratic/post‐democratic unfreedom, one in which capital unbound from democracy thrives at the expense of the people.     

Human Rights Law: Australia and Slovenia

The human rights legal framework of Australia and Slovenia are vastly different. This article explores the evolution of human rights laws of Slovenia and Australia. While the study and comparison of Australia and Slovenia is uncommon, and not often used as an example to highlight aspects of human rights, both states have a long history of cooperation. The first Slovenian reportedly arrived in Australian in 1855. Since then, and particularly following World War Two, there has been a steady stream of Slovenian’s migrating to Australia. Slovenia upon independence prepared a new constitution that reflected the democratic human rights of the European Union, in 1991, and ratified the European Convention on Human rights in 1994. This article highlights how the opportunity Slovenia had to develop a new constitution, they were able to include many human rights that are often found in legislation. Australia’s constitution came into effect in 1901. Being more than 100 years old, there has been no attempts to revise the Australian constitution and expand the current express human rights. This article will determine whether the European Union’s human rights laws have not only influenced Slovenia’s human rights laws, but also Australia’s. This article suggests that Australia has much to learn from the Slovene experience, but is constrained by its constitution and region. This article highlights how a state formed in recent times, has had the opportunity to develop a constitution that reflects modern day human rights while an older state with longer established democracy has fallen behind in its protection of human rights.     

The Logics of Supranational Human Rights Litigation,Official Acknowledgment,and Human Rights Reform: The Southeast Turkey Cases before the European Court of Human Rights, 1996–2006

This article examines the domestic impact of supranational human rights litigation on acknowledgment of state violence in the context of macroprocesses of global governance. The article's argument is that the impact of supranational human rights litigation on the process of acknowledgment must be seen through counternarratives on state violence. The article undertakes a detailed textual analysis of the truth claims and denial strategies that emerged from the European Court of Human Rights proceedings on state violence during Turkey's struggle against the armed group the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). It assesses these in the context of the human rights reforms that were created following pressure from European-level governance processes. The article argues that attention must be paid to agency in acknowledgment and truth-telling processes, and points to the limits of technical-bureaucratic forms of human rights reform interventions in the context of state violence.     

Renegotiating Social Citizenship in the Age of Devolution

The period 2012 to 2016 saw important developments in the role of the United Kingdom's devolved legislatures in shaping the social rights of citizenship. Near‐uniformity in social security is being eroded, with competences devolved to Scotland and Northern Ireland proceeding with limited divergence from Great Britain. This turn to regionalism is linked with dissatisfaction with British government approaches. This article examines developments from a social citizenship perspective. Welfare state regionalism is a challenge to Marshall's perceived unitary view of citizenship. Yet, it is argued, moves towards divergence are driven by regional differences of perspective on citizens' social rights and reciprocal obligations in a way that emphasizes the continued relevance of Marshallian theory. The democratization of political rights gave birth to social rights in the early twentieth century; today, the regionalization of democratic citizenship enables alternative visions for social citizenship to be articulated and begin to shape welfare services at devolved level.     

State‐Sponsored Homophobia and the Denial of the Right of Assembly in Central and Eastern Europe: The “Boomerang” and the “Ricochet” between European Organizations and Civil Society to Uphold Human Rights

State‐sponsored homophobia emerged in certain Central and Eastern European states in the past decade, with the denial of the right of assembly for gay pride marches. However, more recently there has been progress in the recognition of the fundamental democratic right of assembly. What accounts for this progress in fulfilling commitments enshrined in the European human rights treaties? This article proposes that the response of European organizations, in particular the Council of Europe and the European Union, as well as human rights nongovernmental organizations working in collaboration with local civil society organizations, have been critical to this progress. Previous literature has described a “boomerang” effect, in which aggrieved citizens use transnational activist networks to publicize human rights violations and put pressure on governments to fulfill their international legal commitments. To understand the functioning and effectiveness of the “boomerang” we introduce the concept of the “ricochet”—a process in which various institutions and civil society rapidly exchange information as well as political and legal argumentation. We posit that the ricochet is an integral process in the development of a European consensus on the human rights recognized by the European Court of Human Rights. Four cases have been selected for empirical analysis: Poland, Latvia, Serbia, and Russia. In analyzing the ricochet of information and argumentation between institutions and civil society, we find the consensus has been framed around the right of assembly, instead of the more contested area of human rights and sexual orientation.     

European Union Constitution-Making, Political Identity and Central European Reflections

Abstract: This article focuses on the European Union's constitution‐making efforts and their specific reflections in the Central European accession states. It analyses both the temporal and spatial dimensions of constitution‐making and addresses the problems of political identity related to ethnic divisions and civic demos. It starts by summarising the major arguments supporting the Union's constitution‐making project and emphasises the Union's symbolic power as a polity built on the principles of civil society and parliamentary democracy. The EU's official rejection of ethnically based political identity played an important symbolic role in post‐Communist constitutional and legal transformations in Central Europe in the 1990s. In the following part, the text analyses the temporal dimension of the EU's identity‐building and constitution‐making and emphasises its profoundly future‐oriented structure. The concept of identity as the ‘future in process’ is the only option of how to deal with the absence of the European demos. Furthermore, it initiates the politically much‐needed constitution‐making process. The following spatial analysis of this process emphasises positive aspects of the horizontal model of constitution‐making, its elements in the Convention's deliberation and their positive effect on the Central European accession states. The article concludes by understanding the emerging European identity as a multi‐level identity of civil political virtues surrounded by old loyalties and traditions, which supports the conversational model of liberal democratic politics, reflects the continent's heterogeneity and leads to the beneficial combination of universal principles and political realism.     

Divorce and separations in eighteenth-century France: An outline for a social history of law

Marriage breakdown is now common in western society, but it is hardly a new phenomenon. The article investigates the mechanisms and juridical representations of divorce and separation in eighteenth-century France, and argues that if in that century divorce was connected to the secularization of the state, during the 1789 Revolution it gained a new autonomy because of the efforts to add a new article at the universal declaration of human rights. The images of divorce still current today suggest an eighteenth-century past when marriage dissolution was conceived of as a phenomenon involving a more inclusive context of relations and not just as an isolated element of the social reality. Then, discussion of marriage as well as of divorce belonged to a larger domain of family relations and social attitudes, as is evident in the civic representations of these phenomena.     

Bringing European Democracy Back In—Or How to Read the German Constitutional Court's Lisbon Treaty Ruling

This article critically examines the democratic theory that informs the German Federal Constitutional Court's Lisbon Treaty ruling. This is needed because the ruling is ambiguous with regard to which type of democracy applies to which type of Union. In order to analyse the ruling we establish three models of what European democracy possibly can amount to: audit democracy based on the EU as a derivative of the Member States; a multinational federal state; or a regional cosmopolitan polity? The court's depiction of the EU does not fit as well as we would expect when labeled as a derivative entity due to the important legislative role of the European Parliament. The EU's legal supranationalism points in the direction of a federation, but the court's argumentation does not lend support to this notion. The court models democracy on a rather specific set of institutional presuppositions that are derived from the parliamentary model of democracy associated with the sovereign nation state. At the same time, the court operates with a conception of a changing state sovereignty that unfolds more in line with cosmopolitan rather than with classical Westphalian statist principles.     

Shifting the Metaphor: Examining Discursive Influences on the Supreme Court's Use of the Marketplace Metaphor in Twenty-First-Century Free Expression Cases

Justices on the Supreme Court of the United States have employed the marketplace-of-ideas metaphor to communicate how they understand freedom of expression for nearly a century. The meanings behind metaphors, however, are not static. This article examines whether justices’ references to the metaphor in twenty-first-century cases remain primarily tied to the original meaning – one related to the Enlightenment ideas at the heart of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's first use of the metaphor in 1919 – or if the meaning has shifted to represent more discourse-based understandings of communication in democratic society, such as those put forth by John Dewey and Jürgen Habermas. This article, through an analysis of twenty-first century Supreme Court decisions that discussed the marketplace metaphor, identifies evidence of a shift in the Court's understanding of the foundational theoretical concepts behind the meaning of the metaphor.     

Violence,Law, and Politics: Hannah Arendt and Robert M. Cover in Comparative Perspective

Despite many significant points of intersection between his work and that of Hannah Arendt, the legal scholar Robert Cover largely declined to engage her perspective, which posed major challenges to his own. While scholars seeking to rethink Cover's legacy in order to develop a jurisprudence of violence have criticized Cover's acquiescence to the Hobbesian model of the sovereign state, they have similarly ignored Arendt's critique of the Hobbesian model and her attempts to build an alternative to it. This article examines central issues of convergence and divergence between Arendt's and Cover's approaches to law, politics, and violence with the aim to redress this neglect of Arendt's perspective. It begins by focusing on their interpretations of the role and significance of the courtroom trial. It then compares their analysis of the character, effects, and implications of domination as a type of organized power and as a means of conceptualizing punishment, before it concentrates on their instrumental conception of violence, the issue of justification, and its relationship to power. The article concludes by arguing that Arendt's approach, which situates an analysis of law and violence within a broader critique of modernity, provides a more trenchant critical framework for examining the rise of the carceral state than does Cover's.     

The European Convention and the Relative Rights of Resident Aliens

By virtue of conceptual abstraction, the notion of nationality plays a pivotal role in liberal democracies, governing distinctions in the allocation of 'absolute' and 'relative' rights, and determining that while national citizens, as full member of a sovereign political community, enjoy both human and political/social rights, resident aliens are excluded from the scope of these latter, community-related, rights. Further, The European Convention upon Human Rights appears to countenance this dichotomy, allowing sovereign states to restrict the political activity of aliens. This paper nonetheless argues that such a distinction undermines the democratic imperative upon which liberal constitutional states are founded. A 'social integration thesis,' holding that individuals should enjoy, as a fundamental right, the possibility fully to develop their personalities though establishing and pursuing secure social contacts, as well as interpreting those contacts in the light of prevailing cultural perceptions, not only raises the right of stable residence to one of most fundamental attaching to the human condition, but also indicates that political rights—a mere extension of self‐expression and self-fulfilment within civil society—should be recast as a universal entitlement. Article Three of the First Protocol ECHR may be construed in line with the social integration thesis, and consequently, in the matter of the definition of the members of the national community, the political sovereignty of the Nation State must be limited.     

Security, Social Control, Democracy and Migration within the 'Constitution' of the EU

Abstract:  Moving from Michel Foucault's criticism, in the mid-1970s, of a 'theory of the State', this paper addresses the relevance—for the current process of making the 'Constitution' of the European Union—of the obsolescence of the state concept and the emergence instead, in the course of the twentieth-century, of an idea of 'social control' as a way to represent conditions for social order within the new mass democratic society. Such conditions, and the theory thereof, first developed in North America, and then increasingly in Europe after World War II and especially since the 1970s. From such a comparative-historical perspective, the paper then tries to shed light on the debate that was ignited by Dieter Grimm on the very possibility of a 'democratic constitutionalisation' of Europe. The connections between language, social control, and a (democratic) European constitution are then discussed, and specific attention is given to the nexus that has been constructed in today's Europe between migration, criminalisation and security, as a sort of test bench of those connections.     

Piercing the Legal Veil: Commercial Arbitration and Transnational Law

The contemporary search for new forms of international governance, of which the debate around lex mercatoria is but an example, should attentively build on the lessons on public and private ordering learned in the nation state. Sophisticated commercial practices on a transnational scale, while necessitating adaptive and flexible procedures within an adequate institutional framework, involve many of the same normative questions posed by economic law in the nation state. The following article critically discusses the claims made in the lex mercatoria debate as to the rise of a transnational private law society ('Privatrechtsgesellschaft') in which political problems of exclusion and freedom have allegedly been resolved by the universal spread of private autonomy. Against similar images of a world exclusively made up of independent, self-relying market citizens, it is argued that if a conception of rights is to be rescued from the deathbed of the traditional nation state, then the learning experiences made within its confines are well worth considering in light of the pressing legitimacy needs of emerging institutions and polities.     

‘Hermann Heller and the European Crisis: Authoritarian Liberalism Redux?’

This essay tentatively buttresses Alexander Somek's view that Hermann Heller's 1933 essay, ‘Authoritarian Liberalism’, provides a useful starting point for thinking about the ongoing European crisis, in which European authorities are favouring rigid austerity and pro‐business policies while undermining basic liberal and democratic rights. Heller's unfortunate neglect, especially in Anglophone scholarship, is discussed. Nonetheless, Somek and other recent scholars who have turned to Heller to make sense of the European crisis downplay some of the tough questions raised by any attempt to apply Heller's analysis of the Weimar crisis to the contemporary setting. In particular, Heller's theory relied on a robust social democratic statism which has become increasingly unpopular even among theorists on the political left.     

Still in Deficit: Rights,Regulation, and Democracy in the EU1

Abstract: Critics of the EU's democratic deficit standardly attribute the problem to either sociocultural reasons, principally the lack of a demos and public sphere, or institutional factors, notably the lack of electoral accountability because of the limited ability of the European Parliament to legislate and control the executive powers of the Commission and the Council of Ministers. Recently two groups of theorists have argued neither deficit need prove problematic. The first group adopts a rights‐based view of democracy and claims that a European consensus on rights, as represented by the Charter of Fundamental European Rights, can offer the basis of citizen allegiance to EU wide democracy, thereby overcoming the demos deficit. The second group adopts a public‐interest view of democracy and argues that so long as delegated authorities enact policies that are ‘for’ the people, then the absence of institutional forms that facilitate democracy ‘by’ the people are likewise unnecessary—indeed, in certain areas they may be positively harmful. This article argues that both views are normatively and empirically flawed. This is because there is no consensus on rights or the public interest apart from the majority view of a demos secured through parliamentary institutions. To the extent that these remain absent at the EU level, a democratic deficit continues to exist.     

Poland's legal integration into the European community: Some past,present, and future dilemmas

The paper contains some thoughts on the issue of the legal aspects of Poland's integration into the European Community (EC) against the background of Polish efforts to adapt its legal system to European Community requirements. The discussion is divided into three substantive parts: The first part deals with the issue of various legal traditions constituting the general phenomenon of EC law, with the second part spelling out legal aspects of the process of European integration, and finally the paper will be presented by way of a more concrete discussion — e.g., human rights, criminal law in general, and computer crime specifically.     

国家义务是公民权利的根本保障——国家与公民关系新视角

国家义务对于公民权利具有重要价值与意义。从国家与公民关系的历史发展及其在现代民主法治国家的发展趋势来看,国家义务与公民权利的关系现已经成为主导国家与公民关系的主轴,国家义务与公民权利应成为现代公法体系的核心内容和现代公法学的基本范畴。而且,国家义务直接源自于公民权利并决定了国家权力。国家义务以公民权利为目的,是公民权利的根本保障。以国家义务保障公民权利,是对国家权力保障公民权利的超越。     

Locke on Toleration and Inclusion

As the product of liberalism's first encounter with the theoretical problems posed by legal discrimination and unequal treatment of minority groups, Locke's argument for religious toleration foreshadowed contemporary democratic theory's emphasis on non‐coercive discussion of diverse rights claims and broadly inclusive public deliberations. This study tries to illuminate the democratic dimension of Locke's toleration theory by focusing on his crucial account of the church as a voluntary association. Here Locke presented discursive possibilities for the articulation of diverse beliefs and interests that he believed would not only benefit both society as a whole and the minority religious groups contained in it, but also weave principles of contestation and deliberation into the very fabric of the liberal polity.