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Based on the presentation delivered by Danutė Jočienė in the international scientific conference on the occasion of the Day of the Constitution in 2022, this article analyses the official interpretation and application of the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania during the 30 years of the functioning of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Lithuania. The authors present the three most significant directions (areas) of the interpretative activities of the Court as well as some powerful examples from the official constitutional doctrine widely formed by the Constitutional Court. In this article, the three main directions (or areas) of the official constitutional doctrine are analysed. Firstly, the authors present the official constitutional doctrine reflecting the basis for the functioning of the State of Lithuania and society in general: the understanding of the Constitution as such, the principle of the supremacy of the Constitution, constitutional restrictions for the amendment of the Constitution, the content of the constitutional principles of democracy and rule of law, as well as the constitutional principle of separation of powers. The second direction presented is devoted to the official constitutional doctrine on the constitutional human rights protection system, and the third reflects the official interpretation of the Constitution in light of Lithuania’s international obligations. As regards the constitutional human rights protection system, the Constitutional Court has, among other things, noted that the Constitution is a majoritarian act which protects every individual. The Constitutional Court has clearly recognised in its official constitutional doctrine the natural character of the human rights acquired by every individual by the fact of birth. A lot of attention has been paid to the dignity of a person as a constitutional value. In the third area, the most important principle formed by the Constitutional Court during the years of its activities is the constitutional principle of the Openness of the Lithuanian Constitution to international law, including European Union law. Such a position developed by the Constitutional Court results in the clear legal obligation to the State of Lithuania to implement all international obligations, and reflects the way that the interpretation of the Constitution is being opened up and made friendly towards international and European Union law. The constitutional geopolitical orientation principle of the State of Lithuania, as developed by the Constitutional Court, is also presented and analysed. In this article, a lot of attention is paid to the powers of the Constitutional Court, granted to it under the Constitution, to officially interpret the Constitution and to form the official constitutional doctrine. Such a jurisprudential function of the Constitutional Court is presented in this article as a constant and systemic process which enables the Court to interpret the existing, pre-formed official constitutional doctrine more widely, adding to it new elements when there is an objective constitutional need and (or) legal arguments for such an evolutive interpretation of one or another constitutional provisions. At the same time, the idea of the Constitution as a living instrument (or the dynamic interpretation of the Constitution) is stressed. The authors come to the main conclusion that, in all three directions presented in this article, over the thirty years of its activities the Constitutional Court has formed a wide or mature official constitutional doctrine which will serve as a constitutional basis for the future activities of the Court, and which will remain as a legal basis for the further evolutive interpretation of the Constitution.

This book explores the implementation of the UK's FOI law under Tony Blair, showing how the radical policy was weakened by compromises and clandestine agreements before reaching the statute book, though it went on to be controversial and disruptive nonetheless.

A Critical analysis of the response of the ECtHR to the continuing violations of the rights to property and home of the Cyprus IDPs under ECHR general and specific jurisprudence, on Article 1 Protocol No. 1 and Article 8, as it has developed over the last 40 years.

The exceptionality of America's Supreme Court has long been conventional wisdom. But the United States Supreme Court is no longer the only one changing the landscape of public rights and values. Over the past thirty years, the European Court of Human Rights has developed an ambitious, American-style body of law. Unheralded by the mass press, this obscure tribunal in Strasbourg, France has become, in many ways, the Supreme Court of Europe. Michael Goldhaber introduces American audiences to the judicial arm of the Council of Europe-a group distinct from the European Union, and much larger-whose mission is centered on interpreting the European Convention on Human Rights. The Council routinely confronts nations over their most culturally-sensitive, hot-button issues. It has stared down France on the issue of Muslim immigration; Ireland on abortion; Greece on Greek Orthodoxy; Turkey on Kurdish separatism; Austria on Nazism; and Britain on gay rights and corporal punishment. And what is most extraordinary is that nations commonly comply. In the battle for the world's conscience, Goldhaber shows how the court in Strasbourg may be pulling ahead.

This remarkable book shines a fierce light on the current state of liberty and shows how longstanding restraints against tyranny—and the rights of habeas corpus, trial by jury, and due process of law, and the prohibition of torture—are being abridged. In providing a sweeping history of Magna Carta, the source of these protections since 1215, this powerful book demonstrates how these ancient rights are repeatedly laid aside when the greed of privatization, the lust for power, and the ambition of empire seize a state. Peter Linebaugh draws on primary sources to construct a wholly original history of the Great Charter and its scarcely-known companion, the Charter of the Forest, which was created at the same time to protect the subsistence rights of the poor.

The application of academic freedom may lead to a violation of individual rights, such as the right to respect private life or institutional rights such as university autonomy, or the right of the religious community to self-determination. These collisions between rights are resolved by constitutional courts either according to the proportionality test or by balancing the rights. This paper investigates cases from Czechia, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Spain, where academic freedom collided with other constitutional rights, in order to determine methods for resolving these types of conflicts. This analysis demonstrates the way in which proportionality allows the construction of the content of academic freedom. It also shows the reasons why academic freedom could become a weak right and why sometimes it is a strong right.

The First Amendment dominates debate about freedom of speech in the United States. Yet it is not the only legal instrument that protects expressive freedom, the rights of the institutional press, or the democratic values that these rights facilitate. A rich body of local, state, and federal laws also does so, and does so in ways the First Amendment does not. This Article explores the history and present-day operation of this non–First Amendment body of free speech law. Doing so changes our understanding of both the past and the present of the American free speech tradition. It reveals that there was more legal protection for speech in the nineteenth century than scholars have assumed. It also makes evident that the contemporary system of free expression is much more majoritarian, and much more pluralist in its conception of what freedom of speech means and requires, than what we commonly assume. Recognizing as much is important not only as a descriptive matter but also as a doctrinal one. This is because in few other areas of constitutional law does the Supreme Court look more to history to guide its interpretation of the meaning of the right. And yet, the Court’s view of the relevant regulatory history is impoverished. Missing from the Court’s understanding of freedom of speech is almost any recognition of the important nonconstitutional mechanisms that legislators have traditionally used to promote it. The result is a deeply inconsistent body of First Amendment law that relies on a false view of both our regulatory present and our regulatory past — and is therefore able to proclaim a commitment to laissez-faire principles that, in reality, it has never been able to sustain.

It is often said that constitutions are mere parchment barriers that cannot by themselves limit the power of the state or guarantee respect for rights. Little is known at a global and empirical level, however, about the extent to which countries fall short of their constitutional guarantees. This Article documents empirically the global prevalence and severity of constitutional noncompliance over the last three decades and identifies the worst offenders, or \"sham constitutions,\" across several substantive categories. By matching our own data on the rights-related content of the world's constitutions with quantitative indicators of actual human rights performance, we calculate numerical scores that capture the extent to which countries violate the rights pledged in their constitutions or, conversely, uphold more rights than their constitutions contain. These scores are then used to rank countries according to their constitutional \"underperformance\" or \"overperformance.\" Each country's performance is further analyzed across three subcategories—namely, personal integrity rights, civil and political freedoms, and socioeconomic and group rights. The resulting performance scores reveal a number of global trends in constitutional compliance. On average, socioeconomic and group rights are somewhat less likely to be upheld than the other two varieties of rights, but the performance gap among the categories is narrowing over time. Moreover, a country's performance in one category tends to only weakly correlate with its performance in other categories. Relatively few countries fail egregiously to uphold either the positive or the negative rights found in their constitutions. Meanwhile, considerable variation exists in the degree to which specific rights are upheld in practice, ranging from 12% compliance with torture prohibitions to 100% compliance with death penalty prohibitions. Constitutional compliance also exhibits strong geographical patterns. Countries in Africa and Asia tend to promise a wide range of rights in their constitutions but vary greatly in the degree to which they satisfy those self-imposed obligations, with the result that the two continents are home to a substantial majority of the world's sham constitutions. These regional patterns persist, moreover, even if one controls for such variables as wealth and population size. Finally, statistical analysis identifies a number of variables that tend to predict the degree to which countries underperform on their constitutional guarantees. In past decades, the mere inclusion of socioeconomic rights in a constitution was associated with underperformance, but no longer. Wealthy and strongly democratic countries are relatively more likely to uphold constitutional rights, whereas countries that are afflicted by civil war or promise a large number of rights are more likely to fall short. However, neither the existence of judicial review nor the ratification of human rights treaties is statistically associated with increased respect for constitutional rights. Likewise, we find no evidence that constitutional clauses that expressly limit the reach of various rights affect the extent to which those rights are actually upheld.

Unlike many national constitutions, which contain explicit positive rights to such things as education, a living wage, and a healthful environment, the U.S. Bill of Rights appears to contain only a long list of prohibitions on government. American constitutional rights, we are often told, protect people only from an overbearing government, but give no explicit guarantees of governmental help.Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Placesargues that we have fundamentally misunderstood the American rights tradition. The United States actually has a long history of enshrining positive rights in its constitutional law, but these rights have been overlooked simply because they are not in the federal Constitution. Emily Zackin shows how they instead have been included in America's state constitutions, in large part because state governments, not the federal government, have long been primarily responsible for crafting American social policy. Although state constitutions, seemingly mired in trivial detail, can look like pale imitations of their federal counterpart, they have been sites of serious debate, reflect national concerns, and enshrine choices about fundamental values. Zackin looks in depth at the history of education, labor, and environmental reform, explaining why America's activists targeted state constitutions in their struggles for government protection from the hazards of life under capitalism. Shedding much-needed light on the variety of reasons that activists pursued the creation of new state-level rights,Looking for Rights in All the Wrong Placeschallenges us to rethink our most basic assumptions about the American constitutional tradition.

In the Anglo‐American constitutional tradition, judicial checks and balances are often seen as crucial guarantees of freedom. Hayek distinguishes two ways in which the judiciary provides such checks and balances: judicial independence and constitutional review. We create a new database of constitutional rules in 71 countries that reflect these provisions. We find strong support for the proposition that both judicial independence and constitutional review are associated with greater freedom. Consistent with theory, judicial independence accounts for some of the positive effect of common‐law legal origin on measures of economic freedom. The results point to significant benefits of the Anglo‐American system of government for freedom.