Is it possible to know how institutionally stable a country is, how corrupt its rulers are, what is the expectation and standard of living of its inhabitants, how dynamic and complex is its economy, all this, just by identifying and counting certain words in its constitution? We tried to...

The paper examines from a legal perspective the economic policy measures adopted by the institutions of the European Union (EU) to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, and explores their implications for the constitutional architecture of Economic & Monetary Union (EMU). The article maps the...

In this paper, we study the impact of altruism on an interaction between a samaritan and a recipient/parasite in the frame of Buchanan's samaritan's dilemma (1975). We show that, as soon as altruism reaches a certain threshold, the equilibrium of the game corresponds to the situation Buchanan...

The keynote address to the Open Source/Open Society Conference, delivered on 22 August 2016. The address introduces Sir Geoffrey Palmer and Dr Andrew Butler’s new book, A Constitution for Aotearoa New Zealand, and discusses the shortcomings of New Zealand’s unwritten constitution

Over the past three decades, the Supreme Court has led a historicist revolution in equity jurisprudence. In a series of decisions known as the “new equity” cases, the Court has sought to limit federal equitable remedies to the forms of relief typically issued by the English Court of Chancery...

This Article examines the theoretical and doctrinal origins and consequences of a potentially game-changing approach to processing claims brought under the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Since 1990, and the decision in Employment Division v. Smith, the Court has read that Clause...

Constitutional loyalty, the importance ascribed to complying with constitutional rules, is difficult to measure across countries due to differences in context, history, and culture. We overcome this challenge by exploiting the COVID-19 pandemic as an ideal setting in which societies around the...

Since the time of the Protestant reformation, Western societies typically consider themselves not to be governed by divine law but based on a social contract. While all rules governing a society are part of this social contract, a country's written constitution is a central and possibly the most...

This article introduces a novel database that measures governments’ compliance with national constitutions. It combines information on de jure constitutional rules with data on their de facto implementation. The individual compliance indicators can be grouped into four categories that we...