21 September 2022
Constitutionalism under Bolsonaro
On the eve of a fateful election that will determine whether the last four years have been a bad dream and a footnote in Brazil’s political history, or not, the legacy of Bolsonaro’s regime for constitutional law and constitutionalism is widely and expertly discussed. Despite all his rhetorical machismo, Bolsonaro has not governed as a classical autocrat: he was democratically elected and his subsequent administration always found itself between the rock of a fragmented, yet viscerally opportunistic legislature, and the hard place of a judiciary that - while not always unsympathetic to his program - has been primarily interested in safeguarding its autonomy and its (self-)assumed role as the last word on virtually everything. Continue reading >>
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01 December 2021
Corrupting Democracy?
This blog symposium introduces a new collaborative format between Verfassungsblog and the journal Verfassung und Recht in Übersee (VRÜ)  / World Comparative Law (WCL). Today, we inaugurate these joint symposia with the theme of the recently published VRÜ/WCL Special Issue on "Corrupting Democracy? Interrogating the Role of Law in the Fight against Corruption and its Impact on (Democratic) Politics". It thematises corruption and its conceptual pendant anti-corruption as prototypical hard cases for both the rule of law and for democratic politics. Continue reading >>
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31 August 2020
Of Dreams, Nightmares, and a Little Bit of Hope
If there is one common if, perhaps, unsurprising thread in all contributions to this book, it is the affirmation that law is not just the epiphenomenal product of an underlying political economy, nor a mere handmaiden of capitalist reproduction, but a central, perhaps the central, element in it. Continue reading >>
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08 March 2020
On the Value of Human Rights
Florian Hoffmann analyses the left critique of rights and Marx's account of the function of liberal rights as both a necessary legal infrastructure for the 'free' market exchange of commodified labour – and, hence, as an element of the system underlying the constitution and extraction of surplus value - as well as an ideological configuration that obscures the inequality of the (rights-based) exchange relationship through the semblance of equal rights. Is this really all there is to rights in/under capitalism? And are there sufficiently strong and evident alternatives so as to obviate rights (activism) all together? Continue reading >>
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