The Programme for Government of the Fine Gael-Labour coalition formed after the 2011 general election contains a commitment to establish a “Constitutional Convention” to advise on the desirability and form of constitutional amendments in relation to a series of specified matters and to...

This article is about the interpretation of legal texts. Its immediate aim is to defend, against a certain sort of originalist objection, the well-known cases that hold that the Australian Constitution, by implication, guarantees certain political freedoms and entitlements. That is not to say...

The article examines the complexities involved in the establishment of a constitutional culture in Burma, which was named Myanmar in 1989 by military generals who took power. It briefly reviews events leading up to the national convention convened by the military government to draft guidelines...

This article proceeds in the structuralist tradition, which Professor Charles Black describes as "the method of inference from the structure and relationships created by the Constitution." The article takes a structural approach to the Establishment Clause: it reexamines the theoretical...

The goal of this article is to advance the theory of legal entitlements by developing a new theory of autonomy entitlements to describe fundamental constitutional rights and other individual liberties. Such rights, a primary objective of which is to provide, directly or indirectly, a zone of...

The newly emerging subdiscipline of constitutional economics is dominated by adherents to social contract theory although this approach has been severely criticized many a time. In recent years, an alternative approach in which constitutions are conceptualized as conventions has emerged. It is...

My forthcoming Article is divided into the following parts. In Part I, I survey relevant aspects of the law of § 1983 and Bivens. Painting with a broad brush and for the most part descriptively, I maintain that the Court’s concern with over-deterrence has increasingly dominated constitutional...

Along with discussions of global governance, global administrative law, and fragmentation, international legal scholars and other social scientists have increasingly engaged in debates over the causes and effects of global constitutionalization. These debates often suffer from imprecise and...

Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States. More than 12 million premature deaths over the past 40 years were attributable to smoking. Today, smoking causes approximately 438,000 deaths each year and results in over $167 billion in annual health-related economic...

Despite two failed referenda on the subject, local government bodies have been persistent in their campaign for the constitutional recognition of local government. It is not clear, however, what is really intended to be achieved by constitutional recognition and whether sufficient thought has...