The rule of law is a cornerstone of contemporary constitutional democracy1 as was underscored by its role in cementing the recent transitions from authoritarian or totalitarian regimes2 to constitutional democracy in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.3 In the broadest terms, the rule of law requires that the state only subject the citizenry to publicly promulgated laws, that the state’s legislative ...

Part I of this article briefly describes customary law and explores the effect of colonialism on legal pluralism and the region’s early post-colonial constitutions. Part II describes the structure and content of constitutional clauses that exclude personal law and customary law from constitutional non-discrimination protection. Part III briefly examines international and regional human rights l...

II. THE PREDICAMENTS OF IMPLEMENTING HUMAN RIGHTS IN TAIWAN............................................................................................ 148 A. The General Situation: The Grand Justices Build Taiwan’s Constitutional Law on Different Countries’ Constitutional Jurisprudence. ........................................................................... 149 B. Four Features of Current ...

Jack Balkin defies categorization. More precisely, he defies categories. His most recent books, Living Originalism and Constitutional Redemption, transcend the dichotomies of constitutional theory. Repeatedly, they show that what conventional wisdom views as a strict opposition (originalism versus the living constitution, for instance) is in fact not an opposition at all, or that a traditional ...

Academic and political debates about what texts are canonical in the liberal arts have been occurring for some time. In this Commentary, Professors Balkin and Levinson discuss canons and canonicity in the study of law in general and of constitutional law in particular. Canons, they contend, are not simply collections of texts. Skills, approaches, forms of argument, standard examples, and even s...

This article offers a framework for analysing the interrelationships between democratic accountability and constitutional implementation with specific reference to sub-Saharan Africa. It opens by noting the subject’s importance and the contested meaning of key terms, before proceeding to elaborate the significance that constitutional implementation and accountability have for one another. The m...

the idea of supervising  the conformity of statutory law with constitutional law, is due to necessities rooted in two essential principles: the supremacy of constitution and the hierarchy of the law. constitution as the supreme law in the sense of status and legal value , is placed at the top of the legal pyramid of every political system and therefore requires a special organization and discip...

IN TE landmark decision of Mapp v. Ohio,' which barred for the first time the introduction in state courts of evidence obtained by unconstitutional searches and seizures,2 the Supreme Court did not expressly provide whether the decision was to have retroactive effect. The problem raised by this omission has significance to the substantial number of persons convicted of crimes prior to the Mapp ...