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I examine the impact federal appellate courts have on state policy diffusion through the use of computational text analysis. Using a dyadic framework, I model the impact courts have on the decision to adopt a policy and, if adopted, how much text to borrow directly from another state's preexisting law. A court decision ruling a statute unconstitutional can generate up to a 28% relative reduction in the probability of adoption, and a ruling of constitutionality can both increase the probability of adoption by a similar amount and more than double the amount of borrowed text. These findings shed light on how states learn from one another.

Between 1952 and 2012, there were a total of 88 successful military coups in Africa. Of those, 63 occurred prior to 1990, and 10 cases since the adoption, by the defunct Organization of African Unity (OAU), of the Lomé Declaration in July 2000, banning military coups and adopting sanctions against regimes born out of this. The article shows that the African Union (AU) has followed in the footsteps of the OAU in this regard. Assisted by some African regional organisations and international partners, the combined effect of this policy of the AU – assisted by other factors – has been a significant reduction in the occurrence of this phenomenon. While not constituting a funeral arrangement for military coups in the immediate future, these developments – if they were to continue – may indeed make this eventuality achievable in the long run. But the article also reveals some challenges the AU is facing in ensuring this.

Can a constitutional amendment be unconstitutional? Prima facie, this seems like a paradox. This vexing issue has attracted increased attention in recent years. Whereas the definition of the nature of constitutional amendment power is among the most abstract questions of constitutional theory, the question of limits on constitutional amendments is not purely of academic interest. It has practical application; the issue has already been adjudicated in numerous countries and is likely to arise, sooner or later, in other countries as well. This issue of limits is a fundamental one and much could be gained from comparative study. This Article aims to trace the migration of limited amendment power and of judicial review of constitutional amendments through different jurisdictions and to paint a broad pattern of \"constitutional behavior.\" It appears that the global trend is moving towards accepting the idea of limitations—explicit or implicit—on constitutional amendment power. Bearing in mind the difficulties of borrowing (or transplanting) constitutional ideas from different jurisdictions into other legal cultures, this Article claims that limitations upon the amendment power is just one example of the larger phenomenon of the migration of legal ideas. At times, the notion of limited amendment power migrated intact into other jurisdictions, but on other occasions it also absorbed local content, primarily to acknowledge prior events and past experiences. The fact that this concept traveled across continents and entered different legal systems shows that borrowing a constitutional idea can be successful, even within very dissimilar legal systems. This comparative investigation into the origins and the migration of the idea of limits to the amending power will highlight the uniqueness of each legal system and unravel the conundrum of unconstitutional constitutional amendments itself.

This article will analyze the interpretation limits and methodologies used by the Constitutional Court when reviewing constitutional reforms. In Judgment C-551 of 2003, it was established that although the 1991 Colombian Consti­tution does not contain any eternity clauses, the consubstantial elements of the Constitution and those elements of the constitutional block that identify it cannot be changed through constitutional reform. In this case, the power of reform would become constituent power, subverting its powers and giving rise to a procedural defect. In this context, we will examine whether these methodologies are useful in limiting the broad degree of discretion the Court has in determining when a reform supersedes the Constitution En el artículo se analizarán los limites interpretativos y las metodologías que ha dispuesto la Corte Constitucional cuando hace la revisión de las reformas constitucionales. En la Sentencia C-551 de 2003, se dispuso que a pesar de que la Constitución colombiana de 1991 no contiene cláusulas pétreas, no se pueden cambiar o derogar a través de la reforma constitucional los elementos consustanciales de la Constitución y aquellos elementos del bloque de consti­tucionalidad que la identifican. En este caso el poder de reforma se convertiría en poder constituyente, subvertiría sus competencias y daría lugar a un vicio de forma. En este orden de ideas, se verificará si dichas metodologías son útiles para limitar el amplio grado de discrecionalidad que tiene la Corte en determinar cuándo una reforma sustituye la Constitución.

The integration, at the national level, of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights may open the subject of a dispute in relation to a contrary jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court, regarding the protection of human rights. This paper integrates the possible disputes and proposes ways of solving them, as well as proposals for improving the dialogue of European states regarding the jurisdictional protection of human rights.

This article examines how the African Union (AU) has handled Africa's peace and security challenges since 2002, defines what has been successful and what remains aspirational. It does so by examining how the AU has responded, from using sanctions against coups, to deploying peacekeeping missions and mediating in conflicts. An African Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) has developed since 2002, including a Peace and Security Council, an African Standby Force, a Continental Early Warning System and a Panel of the Wise. This sounds impressive, but the operationalization record is patchy: AU-deployed missions have been fully dependent on external donors; harmonization is a major problem; serious questions remain over AU capacity; and some of the Regional Economic Communities (RECs) are developing at a quicker pace than the AU. Given these circumstances and its internal capacity deficit, the AU will likely struggle to exercise oversight of regional processes, including the development of regional standby force arrangements. APSA is clearly based on a liberal peace model, yet democratic systems, respect for human rights and good governance aren't always in place in African countries, and the self-interest of elites continues to be a constraint on APSA and its success. Over the last decade the AU has found a voice and, despite some setbacks, it has shown through AMISOM in Somalia that it is capable of conducting a successful peacemaking operation. Its biggest challenge is not making the decision to intervene or deploy forces, but the capacity of most African states to deploy effectively. APSA's dependence on external partners needs to diminish over the next decade if better African solutions are to be found to peace and security challenges in the continent. Yet, the internationalized nature of crises such as the one in Mali in 2012—13 requires international partnerships. Not all of Africa's security problems can be solved by Africa alone, but APSA does provide a vision framework for African and external partnership.

Judicial self-restraint, once a rallying cry for judges and law professors, has fallen on evil days. It is rarely invoked or advocated. This Essay traces the rise and fall of its best-known variant—restraint in invalidating legislative action as unconstitutional—as advocated by the \"School of Thayer,\" consisting of James Bradley Thayer and the influential judges and law professors who claimed to be his followers. The Essay argues, among other things, that both the strength and the weakness of the School was an acknowledged absence of a theory of how to decide a constitutional case. The rise of constitutional theory created an unbearable tension between Thayer's claim that judges should uphold a statute unless its invalidity was clear beyond doubt (as it would very rarely be), and constitutional theories that claimed to dispel doubt and yield certifiably right answers in all cases.

There is no liability rule for constitutional torts. There are, rather, several different liability rules, ranging from absolute immunity at one extreme to absolute liability at the other. The choice among them does not depend, as the proverbial Martian might expect, on the role of money damages in enforcing particular rights. The right being enforced is irrelevant to constitutional tort doctrine. What matters instead is the identity of the defendant or the act she performs. States and state agencies are absolutely immune from damages liability for violations of constitutional rights, no matter how egregious their conduct may be. The same is true for those who perform legislative, judicial, and certain prosecutorial actions. In contrast, local governments are strictly liable for constitutional violations committed pursuant to official policy or custom, even if the right found to have been violated was first recognized after the conduct triggering liability. Most defendants - including federal, state, and local officers - are neither absolutely immune nor strictly liable. Instead, they are protected by qualified immunity, a fault-based standard approximating negligence as to illegality.

This article employs the concepts of security culture and norm localization to explore some of the cultural dimensions of the African Union's (AU) security policies. After providing an overview of constructivist accounts of norm socialization in international relations, I use these insights to analyse the origins and development of the AU's security culture. The final two sections explore the ongoing process of norm localization in relation to the two most recent tenets of the AU's security culture: intolerance of unconstitutional changes of government and the responsibility to protect principle. An awareness of the uneven and contested nature of this process helps account for the fact that although these two transnational norms have been institutionalized in the AU Charter and endorsed by the United Nations, they have been internalized unevenly by the AU's member states. External advocates of these two norms would thus do well to help the continent's norm entrepreneurs build congruence between these norms and the AU's security culture.