2017 Global Review Of Constitutional Law

This year marks the third edition of the I·CONnect-Clough Center Global Review of Constitutional Law. First published in 2017 to review the constitutional law developments in the world in the year 2016, this edition reviews the constitutional law developments in the world in the year 2018.From 44 jurisdictions in our first year and 61 last year, this year we are pleased to feature 65 jurisdictions. We continue to grow, slowly but steadily. With the help of our current roster of contributors and with new interest from our readers and others, we hope to continue expanding our coverage of the world.The purpose of the Global Review has remained unchanged since its founding. It is to offer readers systemic knowledge that has previously been limited mainly to local networks rather than a broader readership. By making this information available to the larger field of public law in an easily digestible format, we aim to increase the base of knowledge upon which scholars and judges can draw. Our ambition is to make our vast world smaller, more familiar, and more accessible.

Welcome to the fourth edition of the I·CONnect-Clough Center Global Review of Constitutional Law. We were unsure whether the worldwide public health emergency would permit its publication. We are therefore immensely grateful to our dedicated team of collaborators for making this possible. The Global Review was born in 2017, with the publication of the 2016 Global Review. Our articulated goal at that time remains the same today: to offer readers systemic knowledge about jurisdiction-specific constitutional law that has previously been limited mainly to local networks. The Global Review seeks to increase the base of knowledge upon which scholars and judges can draw; we do this by making public law developments around the world available to all in an easily digestible format. Our ambition is to make our vast world smaller, more familiar, and more accessible.This year the Global Review features over 70 jurisdictions. We continue to grow, slowly but steadily. With the help of our current roster of contributors and with new interest from our readers and others, we hope every year to continue to expand our coverage of the world.

This book provides in English the case law of the Colombian Constitutional Court, which has become one of the most creative and important courts of the global south and the world since its creation in 1991. It offers concise and carefully chosen extracts of the Court's most important cases, along with notes and introductory materials to place them in historical and comparative context. The book covers the Court's landmark rights jurisprudence, including the decriminalization of drug possession, the legalization of same-sex marriage, the protection of social rights through broad structural orders such as the ones covering internally displaced persons and the right to health. It also covers the protection of the rights of indigenous peoples to cultural autonomy and to be consulted before economic projects are undertaken on their land, and the rights of victims of the country's long-running internal armed conflict to truth, justice, and reparations. Also provided are the Court's most noteworthy structural cases, particularly its successful attempt to limit the use of states of exception and its substitution of the constitution doctrine, which allows it to strike down amendments that replace rather than amending core principles of the existing constitutional order. The materials focus on the Court's contributions in a comparative perspective, showing how they are exemplary of a range of problems faced by courts around the world and particularly as an example of aggressive judicial review by the courts of the global south. At the same time, they demonstrate how many of the Court's key cases - such as the judicial review of the peace process with guerrilla groups or the striking down of an amendment to allow a popular president to seek a third term - are reactions to the historical features of the Colombian legal and social landscape.

This volume makes a timely intervention into a field which is marked by a shift from unipolar to multipolar order and a pluralization of constitutional law. It addresses the theoretical and epistemic foundations of Southern constitutionalism and discusses its distinctive themes, such as transformative constitutionalism, inequality, access to justice, and authoritarian legality. This title has three goals. First, to pluralize the conversation around constitutional law. While most scholarship focuses on liberal forms of Western constitutions, this book attempts to take comparative law's promise to cover all major legal systems of the world seriously; second, to reflect critically on the epistemic framework and the distribution of epistemic powers in the scholarly community of comparative constitutional law; third, to reflect on - and where necessary, test - the notion of the Global South in comparative constitutional law. This book breaks down the theories, themes, and global picture of comparative constitutionalism in the Global South. What emerges is a rich tapestry of constitutional experiences that pluralizes comparative constitutional law as both a discipline and a field of knowledge.

Over the past 40 years, countries throughout the world have similarly adopted human rights related to environmental governance and protection in national constitutions. Interestingly, these countries vary widely in terms of geography, politics, history, resources, and wealth. This raises the question: why do some countries have constitutional environmental rights while others do not? Bringing together theory from law, political science, and sociology, a global statistical analysis, and a comparative study of constitutional design in South Asia, Gellers presents a comprehensive response to this important question. Moving beyond normative debates and anecdotal developments in case law, as well as efforts to describe and categorize such rights around the world, this book provides a systematic analysis of the expansion of environmental rights using social science methods and theory. The resulting theoretical framework and empirical evidence offer new insights into how domestic and international factors interact during the constitution drafting process to produce new law that is both locally relevant and globally resonant. Scholars, practitioners, and students of law, political science, and sociology interested in understanding how institutions cope with complex problems like environmental degradation and human rights violations will find this book to be essential reading.