Looking Sideways, Looking Backwards, Looking Forwards: Judicial Review vs. Democracy in Comparative Perspective

For the [past] two centuries, the Constitution [has been] as central to American political culture as the New Testament was to medieval Europe. Just as Milton believed that all wisdom is enfolded within the pages of the Bible, all good Americans, from the National Rifle Association to the ACLU, have believed no less of this singular document

The Political Origins of the New Constitutionalism

Globalization, Courts, and Judicial Power Symposiu

Recruiting Super Talent: The New World of Selective Migration Regimes

The desire to be great, to make a lasting mark, is as old as civilization itself. Today, it is no longer measured exclusively by the size of a polity\u27s armed forces, the height of its pyramids, the luxury of its palaces, or even the wealth of its natural resources. Governments in high-income countries and emerging economies alike have come to subscribe to the view that in order to secure a position in the pantheon of excellence, it is the ability to draw human capital, to become an IQ magnet, that counts. Across the globe, countries are vying to outbid one another in an effort to attract highly-skilled migrants, aggressively recruiting those at the top of the talent pyramid who possess what we might call super talent. This spiraling race for talent is one of the most significant developments in recalibrating international migration and mobility in today\u27s globalizing world. Yet it has received only scant attention in academic circles despite its growing prominence in the real world of law and policy-making. In this article, we begin to close the gap. Our discussion highlights the increasingly common practice of governments \u27picking winners through fast-tracked, strategic grants of citizenship for those with exceptional skills and extraordinary talent, while at the same time holding other categories of standard immigration applicants (those entering on the basis of family reunification, humanitarian reasons, and so on) to ever stricter admission and permission-to-stay requirements. We chart and explain these developments before turning to identify the core ethical and legal challenges they raise. The discussion concludes by exploring whether, and if so, how, these striking developments may transform the concepts of citizenship and migration in the twenty-first century. Globalization and the Law: The Next Twenty Years. Indiana University Maurer School of Law, Bloomington, Indiana, April 5-6, 2012

Constitutional Ethnography: An Introduction

Constitutional ethnography is the study of the central legal elements of polities using methods that are capable of recovering the lived detail of the politico-legal landscape. This article provides an introduction to this sort of study by contrasting constitutional ethnography with multivariate analysis and with nationalist constitutional analysis. The article advocates not a universal one-size-fits-all theory or an elegant model that abstracts away the distinctive, but instead outlines an approach that can identify a set of repertoires found in real cases. Learning the set of repertoires that constitutional ethnography reveals, one can see more deeply into particular cases. Constitutional ethnography has as its goal, then, not prediction but comprehension, not explained variation but thematization

Revisiting Contextualism in Political Theory: Putting Principles into Context

© 2017, Springer Nature B.V. In this article, we articulate and defend a contextual approach to political theory. According to what we shall call ‘iterative contextualism’, context has two important roles to play in determining what is required by justice. First, it is through the exploration and evaluation of multiple contexts that general principles are devised, revised and refined. Second, significant weight should be given to the norms to be found in specific contexts because the people affected by those norms strongly identify with them. Having said this, the application of general principles to particular contexts may still result in recommendations which deviate to some degree from the prevailing norms. In this case, we shall argue thatalthough justice requires something other than what local norms say, what is required is likely to be intimated by the relevant context. Thus, whilst considerations of identification act as significant constraints on iterative contextualists’ thinking, the idea of intimations provides them with an important resource