Constitutional reform is a tedious process that requires long periods of time, a relatively broad consensus among the political actors, and often needs popular approval. In spite of these, Romania changed its constitution once (2003) and witnessed several unsuccessful revisions. The most recent...

Constitutional change has been one of the most interesting debates in the recent constitutional law scholarship. A distinction has been drawn between formal and informal constitutional changes, by using as a criterion the compliance with the requirements of the constitutional text regarding...

Romanian constitution-making since 1989 has been of an uneven and recently evermore conflictive kind. In the 1990s, no significant changes to the 1991 Constitution were made, and the role of the Romanian Constitution could be said to be less visible in politics. Since the mid-2000s, in contrast,...

Das Votum der Iren gegen den Vertrag von Lissabon wirft viele Fragen auf. Was sind die Motive der „Nein-Sager“? Haben die Iren stellvertretend für eine schweigende Mehrheit in der EU gehandelt? Sind es die Inhalte des Vertrages, die Unbehagen erzeugen oder ist es die fehlende Beteiligung...

Ethnically diverse societies have long faced the challenge of accommodating distinct and often conflictive normative orders within a single polity. Leaving the ideal of a single, homogeneous legal order aside, many Latin American states have recently acknowledged the right of indigenous peoples...

This paper presents an empirical examination of economic and institutional development. Utilizing a novel data set on American Indian tribal nations, we investigate how constitutional design affects economic development, while holding the broader legal and political environment fixed....

The paper deals with the effects of migration resulting from EU Eastern enlargement on the welfare states of Western Europe. Although migration is good in principle, as it yields gains from trade and specialization for all countries involved, it does so only if it meets with flexible labour...

It is argued that an independent judiciary is a necessary condition for both individual liberty and economic prosperity. After having surveyed the literature dealing with how to arrange for an independent judiciary, the authors derive some additional policy implications by drawing on two...

The member states of the European Union have given up sovereignty in quite a number of policy areas and subjected themselves to joint decisionmaking at the European level. Policy instruments are no longer available nationally in many policy areas, including monetary policy, trade policy, the...