The Supreme Court’s plurality opinion in Baze v. Rees begins with a seemingly simple assertion of constitutional law. “We begin with the principle, settled by Gregg, that capital punishment is constitutional.” It continues, “[i]t necessarily follows that there must be a means of carrying it out.” This second pronouncement provides the foundation for the Supreme Court’s holding in Baze that Kent...

In this paper I offer a novel interpretation of the challenges posed by ‘constitutional drift’—the tendency for de facto political procedures to alter when these procedures no longer are incentive-compatible for those wielding political power—for sound governance institutions, with special reference to the American republic. While it is widely recognized that various watershed political events,...

Venezuelans are to vote on December 2 on major constitutional reform proposals of president Hugo Chávez. If they are approved, Chávez will have consolidated his hold on power and will have substantially diminished the chances of success of any future challenges to his leadership. They will also bring about a number of significant changes that are intended to pave the way for a wholesale restruc...

This Essay examines the recent wave of American Indian tribal constitutional change through the framework of subnational constitutional theory. When tribes rewrite their constitutions, they not only address internal tribal questions and communicate tribal values, but also engage with other subnational entities, i.e. states, and the federal government. This Essay applies that framework to a stud...

Ataxia telangiectasia patients, with constitutional bi-allelic ATM mutations, have a marked risk of lymphoid tumors and ATM mutation carriers have a smaller risk of cancer. Sporadic ATM mutations occur in 10-20% of chronic lymphocytic leukemia and are often associated with chromosome 11q deletions which cause loss of an ATM allele. The role of constitutional ATM mutations in the pathogenesis of...

What are the consequences of the ongoing process of informatisation for the democratic constitutional state? To answer this question a topical perspective of the constitutional state is provided. In this perspective, the constitutional state is portrayed as a 'house', an edifice to which new storeys and rooms have been added and furnished over the course of centuries. Each storey of this edific...

This paper is a preliminary draft of an article to appear in Chicago Law Review (2000), as part of a symposium reviewing two new books on economic analysis of constitutions: Dennis Mueller's Constitutional Democracy and Robert Cooter's Strategic Constitution. Some of the basic questions of constitutional analysis are introduced, and the importance of work in this area is shown as one of the maj...

In 1983 Martin Shapiro worried that the “new jurisprudence of values” being promoted by the new generation of public law scholars in political science would “serve as a cover for slipping back into playing ‘little law professor’ for undergraduates.” Proponents of the “jurisprudence of values” in political science, who engaged in constitutional theorizing about individual rights and the structur...

The PRC enterprise income tax law was enacted on January 1, 2008, with accordance to which the enterprise income tax law system has been changing. It took a long time to promulgate the law just as it takes and will take certain period to integrate the system from the constitutional law to tax polices. The lack of taxing power under constitutional law, the silence of a basic tax law, and the arb...