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The paper deals with private international law after the adoption of the Treaty of Lisbon. In particular, it discusses the legal basis for adopting secondary legislation in this field and the EU competence to conclude international agreements. Next, the EU legislative activity is presented, with particular emphasis on family law, in which enhanced cooperation has already been initiated twice.

In the years since it was established on 1 July 1997, Hong Kong's Court of Final Appeal has developed a distinctive body of new law and doctrine with the help of eminent foreign common law judges. Under the leadership of Chief Justice Andrew Li, it has also remained independent under Chinese sovereignty and become a model for other Asian final courts working to maintain the rule of law, judicial independence and professionalism in challenging political environments. In this book, leading practitioners, jurists and academics examine the Court's history, operation and jurisprudence, and provide a comparative analysis with European courts and China's other autonomous final court in Macau. It also makes use of extensive empirical data compiled from the jurisprudence to illuminate the Court's decision-making processes and identify the relative impacts of the foreign and local judges.

Since 1947 a modernized New Jersey Supreme Court has played an important and controversial role in the state, nation, and world. Its decisions in cutting-edge cases have confronted society's toughest issues, reflecting changing social attitudes, modern life's complexities, and new technologies.Paul Tractenberg has selected ten of the court's landmark decisions between 1960 and 2011 to illustrate its extensive involvement in major public issues, and to assess its impact. Each case chapter is authored by a distinguished academic or professional expert, several of whom were deeply involved in the cases' litigation, enabling them to provide special insights. An overview chapter provides context for the court's distinctive activity.Many of the cases are so widely known that they have become part of the national conversation about law and policy. In the Karen Ann Quinlan decision, the court determined the right of privacy extends to refusing life-sustaining treatment. The Baby M case reined in surrogate parenting and focused on the child's best interests. In the Mount Laurel decision, the court sought to increase affordable housing for low- and moderate-income residents throughout the state. The Megan's Law case upheld legal regulation of sex offender community notification. A series of decisions known asAbbott/Robinsonrequired the state to fund poor urban school districts at least on par with suburban districts.Other less well known cases still have great public importance.Henningsen v. Bloomfield Motorsreshaped product liability and tort law to protect consumers injured by defective cars;State v. Huntshielded privacy rights from unwarranted searches beyond federal standards;Lehmann v. Toys 'R' Usprotected employees from sexual harassment and a hostile work environment;Right to Choose v. Byrneexpanded state constitutional abortion rights beyond the federal constitution; andMarini v. Irelandprotected low-income tenants against removal from their homes.For some observers, the New Jersey Supreme Court represents the worst of judicial activism; others laud it for being, in its words, \"the designated last-resort guarantor of the Constitution's command.\" For Tractenberg, the court's activism means it tends to find for the less powerful over the more powerful and for the public good against private interests, an approach he applauds.

Parliamentary obstruction, popularly known as the \"filibuster,\" has been a defining feature of the U.S. Senate throughout its history. In this book, Gregory J. Wawro and Eric Schickler explain how the Senate managed to satisfy its lawmaking role during the nineteenth and early twentieth century, when it lacked seemingly essential formal rules for governing debate. What prevented the Senate from self-destructing during this time? The authors argue that in a system where filibusters played out as wars of attrition, the threat of rule changes prevented the institution from devolving into parliamentary chaos. They show that institutional patterns of behavior induced by inherited rules did not render Senate rules immune from fundamental changes. The authors' theoretical arguments are supported through a combination of extensive quantitative and case-study analysis, which spans a broad swath of history. They consider how changes in the larger institutional and political context--such as the expansion of the country and the move to direct election of senators--led to changes in the Senate regarding debate rules. They further investigate the impact these changes had on the functioning of the Senate. The book concludes with a discussion relating battles over obstruction in the Senate's past to recent conflicts over judicial nominations.

We examine the effect of consumer advocate participation in administrative procedures on regulatory policy. We use a unique panel database of rate reviews conducted for US electric utilities from 1980 to 2007 to assess how state consumer advocates affect Public Utility Commission decisions on utilities' allowed financial returns and rate structures. We find first that utilities experience fewer rate reviews in states with consumer advocates, consistent with utilities strategically postponing requests for rate increases. Second, after controlling for observed and unobserved state characteristics, we find that PUCs in states with consumer advocates permit returns on equity that are on average 0.45 percentage points lower than states without advocates—equivalent to a $7.9 million (3.7 %) reduction in average utility operating income, all else equal. Third, consumer advocates are associated with lower residential rates relative to other customer classes. Our findings provide statistical support for the thesis that institutionalizing interest group representation in administrative procedures is one way for legislatures indirectly to influence agency-determined policies.

This is a study of the actual role that the Russian Constitutional Court played in protecting fundamental rights and resolving legislative-executive struggles and federalism disputes in both Yeltsin's and Putin's Russia. Trochev argues that judicial empowerment is a non-linear process with unintended consequences and that courts that depend on their reputation flourish only if an effective and capable state is there to support them. This is because judges can rely only on the authoritativeness of their judgments, unlike politicians and bureaucrats, who have the material resources necessary to respond to judicial decisions. Drawing upon systematic analysis of all decisions of the Russian Court (published and unpublished) and previously unavailable materials on their (non-)implementation, and resting on a combination of the approaches from comparative politics, law, and public administration, this book shows how and why judges attempted to reform Russia's governance and fought to ensure compliance with their judgments.

In this book, Víctor Ferreres Comella contrasts the European \"centralized\" constitutional court model, in which one court system is used to adjudicate constitutional questions, with a decentralized model, such as that of the United States, in which courts deal with both constitutional and nonconstitutional questions. Comella's systematic exploration of the reasons for and against the creation of constitutional courts is rich in detail and offers an ambitious theory to justify the European preference for them. Based on extensive research on eighteen European countries, Comella finds that centralized review fits well with the civil law tradition and structures of ordinary adjudication in those countries. Comella concludes that-while the decentralized model works for the United States-there is more than one way to preserve democratic values and that these values are best preserved in the parliamentary democracies of Europe through constitutional courts.

Central European Constitutional Courts in the Face of EU Membership explores German legal influence on other systems of constitutional justice, concentrating on the impact of the Federal Constitutional Court's approach to EU integration on constitutional courts in Hungary and Poland.

The Most Dangerous Branch shows that the Supreme Court has done exactly this in dealing with abortion, assisted suicide, homosexuality, and Quebec secession through decisions that were guided not by reasoned understanding of the principles of law but by the values of judges - values they, as unelected representatives of the Canadian state, had no right to impose. Martin shows that Supreme Court judges have adopted an orthodoxy of moral relativism and identity politics that he likens to a secular state religion. This orthodoxy denies the possibility of objectivity about human endeavour and regards social reality as \"constructed.\" While purporting to be concerned with the plight of the oppressed, it is actually based on profound condescension. Martin believes that the \"theocracy\" which dominates the Supreme Court of Canada is subverting democracy and the rule of law. In The Most Dangerous Branch he calls on Canadians to take back their country.

Advances the thesis that legislative processes are increasingly influenced by constitutional judges and the discursive practices of constitutional adjudication. Parallel to this process, the ordinary judiciary has been carving out wide‐ranging powers of judicial review for itself, seeking to alter statutes deemed unconstitutional. As Stone Sweet argues forcefully, these phenomena have combined to undermine parliamentary sovereignty and to transform the very nature of European government and society. These arguments are illustrated by the detailed comparative examination of five pivotal cases: France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the EU.The discussion of the immediate subject matter takes place, embedded into a wider set of concerns: what are the sources and consequences of judicial power? Why is judicial rule making often basic to institutionalization and political change? Already a classic in the ongoing debate about constitutional politics, this book offers important contributions to the literature on new institutionalism, rational choice theory, and the new constitutionalism in Continental legal theory.