The organizational and personal framework of the "Global War on Terror" in the light of the decisions of the united states courts

The article analyses the law of military detention applicable to the ongoing conflict with Al‑Qaeda and associated forces, to the extent that that law emerges from the jurisprudence of U.S. federal courts, and particularly of the D.C. Circuit. It discusses four major issues: the types of organizations against which military force can be used in accordance with the Congressional authorization, the range of persons subject to military detention in connection with such use of force (in terms of both legal categories and factual predicates), the scope of the battlefield on which the use of force is authorized, and the extent to which American citizens or foreigners lawfully present in the U.S. territory enjoy special immunity from military detention. The article concludes that the impact of the D.C. Circuit decisions on those questions extends beyond the issue of military detention, and provides the general legal framework applicable to other military operations directed against terrorist organizations in the Middle East, such as target strikes or the campagin against the self‑styled Islamic State

Peculiarities of american state constitutionalism

The article summarizes major peculiarities of American state constitutionalism, understood as a set of general principles governing form, legal nature, and content of state constitutions. It focuses primarily on the areas in which state constitutions differ from the federal Constitution. With the large difference in length as its starting point, the article analyzes such features of state constitutions as greater level of detail, broader catalog of constitutional subject matters, frequent incidence of constitutional legislation, plenary as opposed to enumerated character of state governmental powers, and relative ease of constitutional change at state level. It concludes that the foregoing features of state constitutions primarily reflect distrust in state governments (particularly legislatures) and willingness of political actors to treat constitutions as ordinary policy instruments as opposed to fundamental law. The article further examines the influence of those features on state constitutional interpretation, noting that the greater specificity and elasticity of state constitutions on one hand diminishes importance of originalism, but on the other hand - promotes strict textualism and is one of the leading causes of lesser incidence on informal constitutional changes (especially judge‑made) in the states

War in the constitutional thought of the framers of the U.S. Constitution

Founding Fathers occupy a unique place among political thinkers of the Eighteenth Century, mostly because their views on constitutional issues are of substantial importance in the modern interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. The subject of war has played an important role in their constitutional debates. On the one hand, historical examples of past republics have taught them that wars pose a grave threat to any republican government, but on the other, their own experience from the Revolutionary War made it clear to them that the constitutional framework must provide for effective conduct of military operations. In search for balance between efficiency and checks, they have divided the war powers between Congress - authorized to declare war - and the President - charged with conducting it. However, exact delimitation of the authorities of the two branches in the field of war-making has been a subject of numerous controversies among the Framers, both during the constitutional debates and in the first years of the new Union. Those debates remain relevant today and should provide an important starting point in the present-day controversies about relationship between presidential and congressional war powers

Designing constituencies in the French political tradition

The article analyzes the French redistricting process (redécoupage) since 1789, tracing both the evolution of relevant legal norms through the transformations in the political regime and the electoral system, and the actual political practice - what were the driving forces behind consecutive redistrictings, how the districting rules and district boundaries themselves were manipulated for partisan and individual political gain, and how did the resultant district maps measure against standards such as electoral equality and political neutrality. The article concludes that while the French redistricting process remains highly politicized when compared with other European countries, the 2008 constitutional reforms and the changes resulting from them were substantial steps towards greater transparency. Moreover, there is no persuasive evidence that recent redécoupages were systematically manipulated for political purposes by the governing parties

Average Weights and Power in Weighted Voting Games

We investigate a class of weighted voting games for which weights are randomly distributed over the standard probability simplex. We provide close-formed formulae for the expectation and density of the distribution of weight of the $k$-th largest player under the uniform distribution. We analyze the average voting power of the $k$-th largest player and its dependence on the quota, obtaining analytical and numerical results for small values of $n$ and a general theorem about the functional form of the relation between the average Penrose--Banzhaf power index and the quota for the uniform measure on the simplex. We also analyze the power of a collectivity to act (Coleman efficiency index) of random weighted voting games, obtaining analytical upper bounds therefor.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figure