David LANDAU

The Colombian Constitutional Court is a somewhat unlikely place to find a “towering” justice. While the Court has been one of the most activist in the world since its creation in 1991, it is also a highly institutionalized body.

Argelia QUERALT JIMENEZ

Editors’ note: In 2017 Catalonia experienced a crisis following the independence referendum and unilateral declaration of independence from Spain (previously debated on this blog here and here). Criminal trials of Catalan separatist leaders are currently underway: we gather two diverging perspectives on these trials from Argelia Queralt Jiménez and Mireia Grau Creus.

Mireia GRAU CREUS

Editors’ note: In 2017 Catalonia experienced a crisis following the independence referendum and unilateral declaration of independence from Spain (previously debated on this blog here and here). Criminal trials of Catalan separatist leaders are currently underway: we gather two diverging perspectives on these trials from Argelia Queralt Jiménez and Mireia Grau Creus.

Mara MALAGODI

Dramatic political circumstances may give rise to a particular type of towering judicial figures. An explosive context has the potential to trigger a sort of “fight or flight” judicial response; thus, those judges who demonstrate the resilience, confidence, and moral integrity to stand their ground amidst cataclysmic events and political storms represent a subset of heroic judges.

See the full post on our Symposium Partner, the ICONnect Blog: here

Alon HAREL

Much has been written in Israel about the constitutional or, more broadly, the legal revolution instigated to a large extent by the retired, highly influential, Chief Justice Aharon Barak whose name has become identified with the new Israeli jurisprudence. In recent years however, some theorists have been talking about the counter-revolution.

Jaclyn NEO & Kevin TAN

Judges can only ‘tower’ in environs where appropriate opportunities exist for them to do so. For that reason, they are more likely to be found in common law than civil law jurisdictions. They are also more likely to emerge in younger jurisdictions where the law is less settled or where local conditions require a significant departure from the established judicial canons. On that score, a towering judge should have emerged in Singapore a long time ago…

See the full post on our Symposium Partner, the ICONnect Blog: here

Massimo FICHERA

From the outset, the current Italian government (in power since 4 March 2018) has distinguished itself for highly controversial decisions and measures – often with significant constitutional implications for the development of the Italian form of government.

Mark TUSHNET

“Towering-ness” is a relational concept. A towering judge towers over someone – her colleagues or her predecessors, for example. Seeing towering-ness as relational suggests that we can distinguish between “colleague-independent” and “colleague-dependent” conditions for towering-ness.

Tom Gerald DALY

Eighth Global Research Update since DEM-DEC was launched

This eighth monthly update was issued on 7 March 2019 and is now available on DEM-DEC. Sincere thanks to DEM-DEC REsearch Editor Kuan-Wei Chen, who assisted in production of this Update.

Gabrielle APPLEBY & Andrew LYNCH

Two figures tower over the history of the High Court of Australia: Sir Owen Dixon (1929-1964) and Sir Anthony Mason (1972-1995). While our argument is that it is Mason who has risen to be the contemporary towering jurist of Australia’s High Court, they both remain obvious contenders for the appellation of a ‘Towering Justice’ in Australia,…

See the full post on our Symposium Partner, the ICONnect Blog: here

Satya PRASOON, Disha CHAUDHRY & Jai BRUNNER

Editors’ note: this blog post is the second post in a two-part series on ten significant decisions of the Indian Supreme Court in 2018, the first can be viewed here.

There are many academic traditions of interdisciplinary enquiry and critique that can be employed to interpret the Indian Supreme Court's record in 2018, it is however possible to identify some trends.

Rosalind DIXON

The idea of a towering judge is an intriguing and important one: it invites us to focus on the role and jurisprudence of leading judges worldwide, in ways that invites a fine-grained and contextual approach to comparison. Like others, I therefore welcome the focus, and the invitation to be part of it.

Iddo PORAT and Rehan ABEYRATNE

On January 25-26, we convened a conference at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Faculty of Law, bringing together leading constitutional scholars to discuss a new topic in comparative perspective: ‘Towering Judges’. All told, we discussed 13 judges from 12 jurisdictions and two general papers. This Blog Symposium, co-hosted by IACL-AIDC and ICONnect, will give readers a snapshot…

Erika ARBAN & Tom Gerald DALY

This Blog Symposium is based on a recent conference on ‘Towering Judges’, organised by Rehan Abeyratne and Iddo Porat and held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law on 25-26 January 2019. The conference brought together leading constitutional scholars to discuss the topic of prominent or pivotal judges in multiple states, and from a global perspective.

Satya PRASOON, Disha CHAUDHRY and Jai BRUNNER

Editors’ note: this blog post is the first post in a two-part series on ten significant decisions of the Indian Supreme Court in 2018.

There are many academic traditions of interdisciplinary enquiry and critique that can be employed to interpret the Indian Supreme Court's record in 2018. Each has its own sets of presuppositions and points of departure, and each might interpret the judgments differently…

Oreste POLLICINO

As Gabor Halmai has shown very well, the Hungarian constitutional case law has revealed how a not truly independent (euphemism) Constitutional Court is capable of manipulating the notion of constitutional identity in order to distort its original meaning to align it with the views of the political majority in office.

Bilyana PETKOVA

The protection of universal principles varies across different jurisdictions: the prominence of free speech in the United States is undisputed today. In the midst of its identity crisis with looming Brexit, Europe is now experimenting with privacy-as-constitutional identity in a somewhat similar way.

Natalia BRIGAGÃO

Understanding how human dignity made its way into the Brazilian 1988 Constitution, how it relates to social rights and Catholicism and why this unprecedented case offers significant contributions to human rights and constitutional law.

Maartje DE VISSER

Editors’ note: this blog post is a reply to a piece by Fabian Duessel on ‘Getting to know AACC Members’ published on the IACL-AIDC Blog on 2 February 2019 and available here.

In his recent blogpost ‘Getting to Know AACC Members’, Fabian Duessel points to the need for scholars to improve their understanding of the composition, powers and work environment of Asian courts with a constitutional mandate.

Fola ADELEKE

Editors’ Note: This text is a cross-post under Creative Commons licence from The Conversation AFRICA where it was published on 17 February 2019. The original text can be viewed here.

Nigeria has postponed its 2019 presidential elections. The presidential and parliamentary votes have been rescheduled for February 23rd and the gubernatorial, state assembly and federal area council elections have been rescheduled for March 9th.