Category: United States
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Francesca Jackson: King Charles, President Trump and the State Visit: Some Constitutional Considerations
Buckingham Palace has finally announced that the King and Queen’s planned visit to the US will indeed go ahead at the end of April 2026. After US President Donald Trump launched a string of verbal attacks on the UK Prime Minister, there had been growing calls for Keir Starmer to cancel the King’s visit, which…
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Karolina Szopa and Jamie Fletcher: The Future of Abortion Rights under the European Convention on Human Rights in Light of Dobbs
Introduction On Friday 24th June 2022, in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) overruled the right to an abortion nearly 50 years since it first declared it a constitutionally protected right. An outpour of protests and condemnation followed the release of the opinion, with many legal professionals, politicians and NGOs across Europe speaking out…
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Nicholas Reed Langen: Confronting Climate Change in the Courts
Talk is cheap. Governments, particularly wealthy, western ones, have been quick to make promises on climate change. They swear blind that they understand the threat the world faces, and that they will implement a policy response commensurate with it. Few nations have adopted this rhetoric as determinedly as the UK, with the British government promising to…
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Eliza Bechtold: The Republican Party’s Misappropriation of ‘Free Speech’ Undermines American Democracy
Following the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January, several Republican lawmakers accused the press and social media companies of censorship and attempting to ‘cancel’ conservative voices. During Trump’s impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives the following week, Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene gave a nationally televised speech in the House Chamber wearing…
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Guy Baldwin: The Pandemic and the First Amendment
Against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic still raging, the US Supreme Court recently weighed in on the interaction between public health measures and the First Amendment to the US Constitution. The Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, imposed, by Executive Order, occupancy limits on houses of worship in designated zones. On 25 November 2020,…
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Alani Golanski: Why Corrupt Pardons Violate The Rule of Law
Jean-Jacques Rousseau opined in Émile that “[t]he universal spirit of the Laws of all countries is always to favour the strong against the weak, and the one who has against the one who has nothing.” This perspective casts law in a less than flattering light. Anatole France famously showed that the formal equalities provided by…
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Christopher McCrudden: Democracy, protests, and Covid-19: the challenge of (and for) human rights
Two excellent databases enable us to track the effect of Covid-19 on political protests and demonstrations. Both the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project tell a similar story: that the effect of the virus has been mixed. Some protest movements that were active before the pandemic are…
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Antonios Kouroutakis: How liberal is a democracy without a level playing field in the political process?
A couple of days ago, OLAF, the EU’s anti-fraud office after several years of investigation reported that Members of the European Parliament were ‘transferring part of their salaries to the national party coffers.’ Across the pond, Washington Post, a newspaper, reported that the President’s Name, ‘Trump’, would be printed in the memo section of the…
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Eliza Bechtold: Has The United States’ Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic Exposed the Marketplace of Ideas as a Failed Experiment?
The fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic in the US has placed a spotlight not only on the fragility of the American economy and the perils of yawning income and social inequality, but also on the dangers flowing from the crisis of truth infecting US politics and American culture more broadly. In particular, President Trump’s purported…
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Paul Yowell: Is Miller (No 2) the UK’s Bush v Gore?
Miller (No 2) and Bush v Gore (2000) have something in common. Both cases featured judicial intervention in politics and basic questions of constitutional power. Both resulted in controversial outcomes that provoked popular suspicion about the personal motives of justices. The US Supreme Court was visibly divided, but the unanimity of the UK Supreme Court…