ON APRIL 30, 2006, the Egyptian Parliament voted by a large majority to renew the emergency law. This law grants the president extraordinary powers to detain citizens, prevent public gatherings, and issue decrees with little accountability to Parliament or the people. The vote was a famil­ iar ritual: the Egyptian Parliament has routinely approved the emergency law for most of the past forty ye...

A number of states have proposed initiatives or implemented laws that prohibit state courts from applying, considering, or interpreting foreign law, and in particular, Islamic law. The constitutionality of anti-Sharia legislation is in question. Its proponents claim that the Sharia ban protects state and federal constitutional rights, whereas its opponents claim that the ban infringes on the re...

IN THE REALM OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW, feder-alism can be classified as a perennial issue, its history predating the adoption of the constitution itself.' Federalism conveys both a sense of structure and a sense of mandate, and while it is not as constant a presence in constitutional jurisprudence as issues affecting individual rights, it is a concept, nevertheless, which is a deeply rooted one, f...

This Article demonstrates the overlooked contribution of the ancient Near East to the development of constitutional law. The legal corpus of Deuteronomy provides a utopian model for the organization of the state, one that enshrines separation of powers and their systematic subordination to a public legal text—the “Torah”—that delineates their jurisdiction while also ensuring their autonomy. Thi...

Most constitutional challenges in federal court to federal statutes are litigated in the familiar pattern of a decision by a single U.S. District Judge, followed by an appeal to a three-judge panel of one of the U.S. Court of Appeals, followed by the filing of a writ of certiorari in the U.S. Supreme Court, which has discretion to grant or deny the writ. Sometimes, however, Congress requires a ...

IN MOST CONSTITUTIONAL democracies, the interpretation of the constitution involves the power of the judiciary (typically the supreme or constitutional court) to determine issues of profound moral and political importance, on the basis of very limited textual guidance, resulting in legal decisions that may last for decades and are practically almost impossible to change by regular democratic pr...

BACKGROUND In Italy in 2004, a very restrictive law was passed on medically assisted reproduction (MAR) (Law 40/2004) that placed Italy at the most conservative end of the European spectrum. The law was widely criticized and many couples seeking MAR brought their cases before the Italian Civil Courts with regard to pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), donor insemination and the issue of co...

For nearly 100 years following federation there was not a settled view as to whether there existed but one common law in Australia, as opposed to a common law for each polity in the Australian federation. This article investigates why that was so. It considers the constitutional and juristic underpinnings of the now established position that there is a single common law in Australia, identifyin...