Showing papers by "Emilios Christodoulidis published in 2001"

Lethe's Law: Justice, Law and Ethics in Reconciliation

Abstract: This book offers a series of original essays by an international group of scholars whose work looks comparatively at law's attempts to deal with the past. Ranging from questions of criminal responsibility and amnesty to those of law's relation to time,memory, and the ethics of reconciliation, it is a sustained jurisprudential and philosophical analysis of one of the most important and pressing legal concerns of our time. Among its key concerns is that justice's demand on law has changed and, in the face of a divided and violent past, law is being called on to do the kind of work it ordinarily shuns. What this means for conventional understandings of law, as well as for the relation between law and politics in times of transition, is explored through a discussion of experiences from Eastern Europe and Germany, to South Africa, Israel, and Australia. The book thus provides a timely investigation of the nature of law and legal institutions in times of political and social change, and will appeal to a broad international audience including lawyers, political theorists, criminologists, and philosophers.

The Aporia of Sovereignty: On the Representation of The People in Constitutional Discourse

Abstract: I Pierre Rosanvalon's political history of France, an absence haunts the history of democratic representation Democracy and popular sovereignty have represented for two centuries \"l'horizon évident du bien politique\", and yet even in its lands of origin where it has been most affirmed and celebrated, democracies \"sont bien marquées par la déception, comme si elles incarnaient un idéal trahi et défiguré\". In European constitutionalism a similar absence registers in at least two ways. In the perennial discussion of the Union's \"democratic deficit\" as well as more dramat­ ically, if the German Constitutional Court is to be taken seriously, in the absence of what might identify a demos for us: \"existential sameness\". I would like to trace that problematic relationship between the democratic will of a sovereign people and the con­ stitution that purports to represent the people by containing the expression of its will. My interest is thus in the triangular relationship between the sovereign people, con­ stitutional reason and democratic will But as paradoxes spring up everywhere, I will address the complexity of this relationship gradually; let me proceed through famil­ iar territory first to explore the connection between the latter two concepts. American constitutional theorists are fond of saying that it is hard to reconcile reas­ on and the will They obsess about the \"counter-majoritarian paradox\", the \"federal­ ist\" dilemma, the Thayerite objection\", the clash between self-rule and law-rule, and what—in numerous other formulations—boils down to roughly this: how can we jus­ tify our commitment to democracy and thus to the right of a sovereign citizenry to determine the terms of public life and at the same time curtail that right in the name of constitutional rights? Every answer to this appears to stumble on paradox.