The limits of legal accountability of the European Central Bank

This article will focus on the state of legal accountability in the relation between the European Court of Justice (“ECJ”) and the European Central Bank (“ECB”) as developed after the unfolding of the so-called Euro Crisis. The underlying hypothesis behind this analysis is twofold: the 2008 crisis has marked a remarkable change in the constitutional balance of the Eurozone, and as a consequence the constitutional function of the ECB has emerged and become visible. To detect these changes, three cases will be discussed in order to show that there has been a shift in the ECJ’s interpretation of the Treaty on the European Union (“TEU”) and the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (“TFEU”) (“the Treaties”)1 and, accordingly, of the role of the ECB. The reaction to the Euro crisis has shown that the ECB cannot be deemed to be only an administrative independent agency, but it should be treated as an organ with constitutional functions, whose role has systemic implications for the stability of the European Union itself.2 Such recognition implies that the ECB’s decisions ought to be treated not only procedurally, but in a genuinely political and constitutional way

Quantum interference in nanometric devices: ballistic transport across arrays of T-shaped quantum wires

We propose that the recently realized T-shaped semiconductor quantum wires (T-wires) could be exploited as three-terminal quantum interference devices. T-wires are formed by intersecting two quantum wells (QWs). By use of a scattering matrix approach and the Landauer-B\"uttiker theory, we calculate the conductance for ballistic transport in the parent QWs and across the wire region as a function of the injection energy. We show that different conductance profiles can be selected by tailoring the widths of the QWs and/or combining more wires on the scale of the Fermi wavelength. Finally, we discuss the possibility of obtaining spin-dependent conductance of ballistic holes in the same structures.Comment: To appear in the 09/15/97 issue of Appl. Phys. Lett. (9 pages in REVTEX + 2 figures in postscript

The normativity of code as law: towards input legitimacy

In the debate on how the new information and communication technologies impact on democratic politics the role played by the digital architecture seems to be surprisingly underrated. In particular, while a lot of attention has been paid to the possibilities that new technologies open up to democratic theory, few works have attempted to look at how democracy may help in shaping technologies. By adopting as a starting point the approach known as ‘code as law’, the paper aims at two objectives: to re-affirm the importance of discussing normative principles to guide the process of code writing in order to reinvigorate the debate; to claim the importance of input reasons when deciding which principles should be chosen. After having remarked that code is relevant for establishing democratic norms, the paper briefly tackles with the main attempts by European scholars to deal with this issue. Then, a couple of practical examples of how code impacts on democratic rights are sketched out. In the last section of the paper a shift from an output-based approach to the legitimacy of code to an input-based is openly advocated: an inquiry into the legitimacy of code should focus on its production

Introduction to the material study of global constitutional law

The article addresses the question of how to study global constitutional law by suggesting a material methodology. Drawing from previous studies of the notion of the material constitution, both from materialist and institutionalist types (Marx, Mortati, Poulantzas), the article proposes to look at the development of global constitutional law, in its many instantiations, in terms of its relation with the state. Accounts of the autonomy of global constitutional law are requalified in terms of relative autonomy. More specifically, global constitutional law is conceived as a legal construction functional to the transformation of the contemporary state. From the perspective of the material study of constitutional law, the state is still deemed to be the main unit of analysis, but, at the same time, state-centred accounts based on an exceptionalist understanding of sovereignty are rejected as reductive and, at times, inaccurate

The early warning system and the monti II regulation: the case for a political interpretation

Human rights protection - Proportionality - Deference - Procedural rationality - Process-review - Interplay national courts and Strasbourg court

A note on an additive property of primes.

An elementary construction is given of an infinite sequence of natural numbers, having at least two different decompositions as sum of primes and no prime number appears in more than one of them

Two internal critiques of political constitutionalism

The antagonism between legal and political constitutionalism has almost monopolized the discussion on constitutional theory during the last years. For this reason, political constitutionalism has been assessed mainly as an alternative to legal constitutionalism. Moving beyond this perspective, this article intends to focus exclusively on political constitutionalism and its internal tensions. After having outlined the main tenets of this theory, two internal critiques are put forward, both concerning the understanding of the political aspect of constitutionalism: first, political constitutionalists propose a reductive account of the principle of political equality; second, their exclusive focus on ordinary politics as the centre of constitutional life is misleading and precludes a correct evaluation of constitutional politics

A note from the editors: the state of the political constitution

The revival of the political constitution has come about in parallel with two developments, one in constitutional practice and the other in political theory. With regard to the former, the political constitution has been seen as something of a bulwark against the rise of legal (or judicial, or common law) constitutionalism.  The seeming hegemony of this latter model of constitutionalism among contemporary lawyers and political scientists has produced from (so-called) political constitutionalists a reaction against the delegation of important decisions to non-political institutions and an obsessively court-centered scholarship.  Perceiving this shift in focus from political to legal institutions to be the very antithesis of the traditional Commonwealth (more particularly, of the United Kingdom’s parliamentary) model of constitutionalism, and, more broadly, to be an affront to democratic sensibilities, the notion of the political constitution was retrieved and defended in a seminal article in the 1979 edition of the Modern Law Review, written (though first delivered in his Chorley Lecture the previous year) by the late John Griffith.  More recently, in the work of Adam Tomkins, Richard Bellamy, and Grégoire Webber and Graham Gee, a normative interpretation has been lent to Griffith’s thesis so as to provide a full-fledged constitutional theory capable of standing as an alternative to the liberal-legal paradigm—a turn, one might say, from the political constitution to political constitutionalism

Phase lapses in scattering through multi-electron quantum dots: Mean-field and few-particle regimes

We show that the observed evolution of the transmission phase through multi-electron quantum dots with more than approximately ten electrons, which shows a universal (i.e., independent of N) as yet unexplained behavior, is consistent with an electrostatic model, where electron-electron interaction is described by a mean-field approach. Moreover, we perform exact calculations for an open 1D quantum dot and show that carrier correlations may give rise to a non-universal (i.e., N-dependent) behavior of the transmission phase, ensuing from Fano resonances, which is consistent with experiments with a few (N < 10) carriers. Our results suggest that in the universal regime the coherent transmission takes place through a single level while in the few-particle regime the correlated scattering state is determined by the number of bound particles.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, RevTex4 preprint format, to appear in Phys. Rev.

A sense of self-suspicion: global legal pluralism and the claim to legal authority

Legal pluralism has become common currency in many contemporary debates on law and globalization. Its main claim is that a form of global legal pluralism represents both the most accurate description of law in times of globalization and the best normative option. On the descriptive level, global legal pluralism is considered more reliable than state-based accounts. On the normative level, global legal pluralism is understood as a possibility to open up the legal realm to previously unheard voices. This article assesses these claims against the background of classic legal-pluralist scholarship. After reconstructing the emergence of global legal pluralism and then examining its epistemic and normative versions, the last two sections identify the shortcoming of this approach by underlining the absence of what the authors call ‘a sense of self-suspicion’ in drawing the map of legalities in the global sphere. The main argument put forward is that global legal pluralism is oblivious of a few key insights offered by the founding fathers of classic legal pluralism