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The work of the mid-Victorian jurist, AV Dicey, has had a remarkable influence on British constitutional thought, not least in establishing the orthodox framework within which modern constitutional lawyers continue to work. That legal positivist framework has, however, recently been challenged by jurists advocating what is generally called common law constitutionalism. Accepting the core of sense in Dicey's account, their objective has been to revise some of the jurisprudential underpinnings of his framework for the purpose of showing that the dominant characteristic of the British system is not sovereignty but legality. Mark Walters now builds on this revisionary work by offering a new historically informed study of Dicey's Law of the Constitution , which is designed to show that the orthodox interpretation of Dicey as a legal positivist is itself misconceived. Walters argues that, properly understood, Dicey had a more nuanced appreciation of the relationship between sovereignty and legality than is commonly appreciated. This review article examines Walters's exercise and assesses its contemporary significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of constitutional democracy has been a remarkable feature of the last 30 years, but during the last decade it has suffered a dramatic decline. That decline is marked less by constitutional democracies being overthrown than by an increase in regimes that retain the formal institutional trappings while flouting the norms and values on which constitutional democracies are based. This process of constitutional degradation is the subject of two recent books that together present the most comprehensive evaluation available on the current state of constitutional democracy. In this review article, the findings and analysis presented in Graber, Levinson and Tushnet's Constitutional Democracy in Crisis? and Ginsburg and Huq's How to Save a Constitutional Democracy are examined and appraised. The article argues that solutions to the contemporary crisis cannot be found only by strengthening liberal institutions; to survive, constitutional democracy must also seek to reinvigorate its democratic aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Glossing a passage from Benjamin Constant's Reflections on Constitutions, this article first assesses the roles performed by silences, gaps, and abeyances in constitutional texts and then examines recent initiatives that seek to fill those silences. The initiatives to fill those silences are evaluated by contrasting three conceptions of modern constitutions: the constitution as a framework for continuing political negotiation, the constitution as an order of values, and the constitution as facilitator of an evolving administrative order. The first, the framework conception, highlights the importance of political practices and in particular of the deliberative role of the legislature, the second, the value order conception, accentuates the moral dimension of constitutions and promotes the judiciary's role as guardian of constitutional values, and the third, the administrative order conception, emphasizes technical efficacy and the key role of the executive in promoting a governmental agenda. The article concludes by raising questions about those recent approaches that seek the elimination of constitutional silences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on republican constitution. The author discusses the historical claim of Adam Tomkin regarding republicanism in relation to the British constitution. Moreover, he mentions the common pattern of deficiencies in Tomkin's work wherein he discusses some topics related to the formation of the British constitution, republicanism and others.

The article outlines a simple thesis: that international investment arbitration -- pursuant to regional and bilateral investment treaties -- offers the dearest example of global administrative law, strictly construed, yet to have emerged. We present this thesis by explicating four key features of investment treaties: they permit investor claims against the state without exhausting local remedies: they allow claims for damages: they allow investors to directly seek enforcement of awards before domestic courts: and they facilitate forum-shopping. Our argument is that, owing to this unique conjunction of features, the regulatory conduct of states is, to an unusual extent, subject to control through compulsory international adjudication. Having highlighted these features, we then claim that investment arbitration is best analogized to domestic administrative law rather than to international commercial arbitration, especially since investment arbitration engages disputes arising from the exercise of public authority by the state as opposed to private acts of the state. Further, we claim that the linkages between Investment arbitration and domestic legal systems are more direct and more closely integrated than other forms of international adjudication in the public sphere. For these reasons, we argue that the emerging regime of investment arbitration Is to be understood us constituting an important and powerful manifestation of global administrative law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explains that the turning point for constitutional law theory comes during the 1990s and that it is driven by limitations in the solutions posited by the application of liberal political philosophy to constitutional questions. Formal framework of fundamental law that establishes and regulates the activity of governing a state; Expression of a political way of being.