226 research outputs found
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
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 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
Constitucionalismo politico y el valor de la toma de decisiones constitucionales
El debate sobre el constitucionalismo político ha
descuidado por completo la dimensión de la toma de decisiones
constitucionales. Esto se debe probablemente al hecho de que esta
dimensión, por lo general, trae consigo consecuencias indeseadas
como la consagración de derechos o estructuras constitucionales.
Estos resultados no respetan el desacuerdo razonable entre los
ciudadanos, ya que violan el único sistema justo para la solución de
desacuerdos: regla de la mayoría y derecho de voto igualitario. El
artículo sostiene que los constitucionalistas políticos debieran
lamentar esta ausencia de toda consideración sobre la toma de
decisiones constitucionales. O ellos están pasando por alto algunos
problemas inherentes al proceso electoral que se supone debe
ocuparse del desacuerdo o, peor aún, ellos están restando importancia
a los efectos de la consagración constitucional de los procesos
políticos ordinarios, al ignorar las propiedades redentoras de poder
constituyente. En ambos casos, sus propuestas socavan la dimensión
política del constitucionalismo
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