We are the People : Alien Suffrage in German and American Perspective

This article will explore the constitutional debate over alien suffrage in the FRG, both for its own interest and in order to compare it with understandings of alien suffrage in the United States. As the interdependence of national economies deepens and regional common market arrangements multiply, more nations (including the United States) may be called upon to rethink the question of alien suffrage. The thoroughness and the explicitness with which the German legal community has debated this issue has brought to the surface arguments and assumptions that remain latent in U.S. commentary on the political status of aliens. Thus, the German dispute and its resolution not only mark a stage in the evolution of nationalism and unification in Europe, but illuminate the place of aliens in political theory and legal thought

Dangerous Intersection

This is a forward for the articles submitted for the 2009 Symposium - The Evolving Definition of the Immigrant Worker: The Intersection Between Employment, Labor, and Human Rights Law

Rhetorical Slavery, Rhetorical Citizenship

A Review of American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion by Judith N. Shkla

Conflict of Constitutions? No Thanks: A Response to Professors Brilmayer and Kreimer

This colloquy was organized around the unpleasant hypothesis that the Supreme Court would overrule Roe v. Wade and that Congress would not fill the resulting void with federal legislation. The abortion debate would then move to the states, where local majorities could enact their own resolutions. If the local majorities were large enough, they could even write their local resolutions into their state constitutions. The contrasting state constitutions that could result might then replicate the comparativists\u27 current juxtaposition between the U.S. Constitution and the constitutions of Germany and Ireland. In some states, prohibition of abortion would be constitutionally required, while other states would give constitutional recognition to a woman\u27s right to choose. Federal preemption principles and federal rights doctrines do not ordinarily distinguish between state statutes and state constitutional provisions as objects of federal displacement. That Brilmayer and Kreimer offer no separate analysis of such a variation on their hypotheticals is therefore understandable. But I hope to show that this . variation underlines some of the troubling aspects of territorialism, and particularly of Brilmayer\u27s proposals concerning preemptive grants of autonomy