Constitution

About: Constitution is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 37828 publications have been published within this topic receiving 435603 citations.

Constitution Making and Democratic Innovation: The European Union and Transnational Governance

Abstract: The European Union stands before a constitutional moment. While some deny the need for a constitution and others want a familiar federal form, I argue that one of the main goals of the constitutional convention ought to be to make the European Union more democratic. The central question is: what sort of democracy is suggested by some of the more novel aspects of European integration? This question demands a normative standard by which to evaluate the realization of democracy in transnational polities. Along republican lines, the proper standard is nondomination. With this normative framework in mind, the problem that the constitution has to solve is juridification, or the possibility of legal domination where there is no unified sovereignty. The solution to this problem of legal domination requires that the constitution institute a reflexive legal order best realized in a deliberative federalism appropriate to a polycentric and diverse polity. Finally, the institutions of this federalism ought also to be ...

The Sharia Debate and the Origins of Nigeria's Second Republic

Abstract: From 1977 to 1979, Nigeria prepared itself for the coming Second Republic. Most important on the agenda was the writing of a new Constitution. The Supreme Military Council (S.M.C.) appointed a Constitutional Drafting Committee, and its Draft was debated by the Constituent Assembly, which included elected members from all 19 States, as well as a number nominated by the S.M.C. The Draft, along with the changes proposed by the Constituent Assembly, were presented in September 1978 to the S.M.C. which made further alterations. That Constitution provided the basis for the subsequent elections of July and August 1979, and the formal inauguration of the Second Republic took place in October.

2005-06 Brennan Center Symposium Lecture - Constitutional Culture, Social Movement Conflict and Constitutional Change: The Case of the De Facto Era

Abstract: Social movements change the ways Americans understand the Constitution. Social movement conflict, enabled and constrained by constitutional culture, can create new forms of constitutional understanding - a dynamic that guides officials interpreting the open-textured language of the Constitution's rights guarantees. To show how constitutional culture channels social movement conflict to produce enforceable constitutional understandings, I consider how equal protection doctrine prohibiting sex discrimination was forged in the Equal Rights Amendment's defeat. This story of the "de facto ERA" illustrates how constitutional culture can channel social movement conflict to produce little noticed socially integrative effects. As movement and counter-movement struggle to persuade (or recruit) uncommitted members of the public, each movement is forced to take account of the other's arguments, and in time may even begin to incorporate aspects of the other's arguments into its own claims - a dynamic that can transpire unconsciously or with the conscious purpose of strengthening arguments under conditions of adversarial engagement. Movement conflict also plays an underappreciated role in enabling judicial review. As adversaries hone their arguments to meet their opponent's most powerful claims, the quest to persuade creates areas of apparent or actual convergence in which the Court can decide cases. The ERA ratification debates led opponents to assert that the Fourteenth Amendment already contained sex equality principles that ERA proponents insisted should be added to the Constitution, and led proponents to separate concepts of sex equality under the ERA from abortion and gay rights which opponents charged the ERA would promote. Understandings consolidated in the ERA debate guided the Court as it ruled that sex discrimination violated the equal citizenship principle and as it limited the kinds of practices cognizable as sex discrimination. Examining how the ERA's proposal and defeat shaped the modern law of sex discrimination suggests that when social movement conflict is channeled by constitutional culture, it can guide officials in enforcing the Constitution in new ways, enabling constitutional change without lawmaking that nonetheless respects the distinction between politics and law. Constitutional culture provides the understandings and practices that citizens and officials draw on in debates about the Constitution's meaning, structuring the forms of communication and deliberative engagement among citizens and officials that dynamically sustain the Constitution's democratic authority in history.

Introduction: Contested competences in the European Union

Abstract: In this article, we set out an approach to European Union politics that seeks to explain its development using theories of institutional change. In contrast to dominant theories which assume that the Treaties, the governing texts of the European Union, faithfully ensure that the desires of member states are respected, we argue that these theories are incomplete contracts, rife with ambiguities. This means that during periods between Treaty negotiations, we may expect that collective actors in the European Union policy process – the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council – will each seek to bargain over these ambiguities so that their effective competences are maximised. Their ability to negotiate successfully will depend on their bargaining strength. These ‘conflicts over competences’ may lead to the creation of informal institutions. They may also in the longer term lead to formal institutional change, if they become folded into Treaty texts, or otherwise influence them, in subsequent rounds of negotiation. What are the sources of change in institutional settings such as the European Union? This question is at the heart of important debates in both comparative politics and international relations. In the study of the EU, an influential body of scholarship has argued that the Treaty texts, the underlying ‘constitution’ of the EU, fully reflect the intentions of their drafters. Member states create the correct incentives for the other actors, the Commission, Parliament, to act according to the formers’ preferences (Moravcsik 1998; Tsebelis and Garrett 2001). Change, when it occurs, reflects changes in the underlying constellation of member state interests. In this volume, we set out to challenge this set of arguments and to show how change may be driven by conflicts between the Council, Parliament and Commission over their respective competences within the legislative and policy-making process in the period between formal Treaty changes. Not only does the argument that Treaty texts faithfully implement member state interests seem at odds with much of the existing empirical evidence; it implicitly rests on the contestable theoretical assumption that the principals in complex principal–agent relationships can draft complete contracts which

Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War

Abstract: 'An attractively written, cogently argued study that merits a prominent place on the bookshelves of Anglo-American and Civil War scholars' - "Journal of American History". 'Jones offers a fresh revision ...on why England failed to intervene in the American fratricidal struggle...[His] book combines a delightful writing style with excellent bibliography and footnotes. It is based on solid research, primarily in original sources. It is a work that will serve well both the scholar and the general reader' - "American Historical Review". 'Thought-provoking ...Jones does a laudable job of presenting both the British arguments for and against intervention and the foundations of the crisis in the relationship between [Great Britain and the United States]' - "Library Journal". 'A model diplomatic history' - "Choice".The Lincoln administration feared that Great Britain would officially recognize the Confederacy during the Civil War, thereby granting legitimacy to secession and undermining the U.S. Constitution. What did happen, and why, is brilliantly described by Howard Jones in "Union in Peril: The Crisis over British Intervention in the Civil War". Howard Jones, University Research Professor in history at the University of Alabama, is the author of numerous books, including "To the Webster-Ashburton Treaty: A Study in Anglo-American Relations, 1783-1843" and "Course of American Diplomacy: From the Revolution to the Present".