Consolidating the New Constitutional Regime

2022 ◽  
pp. 342-360
Author(s):  
R. R. Palmer

This chapter details events following the end of the Terror and the political and emotional crisis of the Year II. The question that a great many Frenchmen put to themselves both in France and in the emigration, and a question to which observers throughout Europe and America awaited the answer, was whether some kind of moderate or constitutional regime would be durably established. The next four years showed that constitutional quietude was still far away. The difficulty was that not everyone agreed on what either moderation or justice should consist in. Justice, for some, required the punishment of all revolutionaries and their sympathizers. For others, it meant a continuing battle against kings, priests, aristocrats, and the comfortable middle classes. Both groups saw in “moderation” a mere tactic of the opposition, and moderates as the dupes of the opposite extreme. Compromise for them meant the surrender of principle. It meant truckling with an enemy that could never be trusted, and had no real intention of compromise.


2004 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Morse

How to respond justly to the dangers persistent violent offenders present is a vexing moral and legal issue. On the one hand, we wish to reduce predation; on the other, we want to treat predators fairly. The central theme of this paper is that it is difficult to achieve both goals without compromising one of them, and that both are being seriously undermined. I begin by explaining the legal theory, doctrine and practice governing dangerous offenders (DO) and demonstrate that the law leaves a gap in the ability to confine them. Next I explore the means by which the law has overtly or covertly sought to fill the gap. Many of these measures, especially the new form of civil commitment for sexual predators, dangerously conflate moral and medical categories. I conclude that pure preventive detention is more common than we usually assume, but that this practice violates fundamental assumptions concerning liberty under the American constitutional regime.


2015 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 7-20
Author(s):  
Mazen Masri

Partitioning historic Palestine into two states is often presented as the most plausible solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This article examines the potential impact of such a development on the Palestinian citizens of Israel (PCI), primarily from the vantage point of Israel's constitutional regime. The article explores three fundamental aspects of the Israeli constitutional system—its instability, the “Jewish and democratic” definition of the state, and the exclusion of the PCI from “the people” as the unit that holds sovereignty—and argues that the envisaged two-state solution will only reinforce the definition of Israel as a Jewish state and consequently provide further justification for the infringement on the rights of its Palestinian citizens.


2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 42-58
Author(s):  
Emilio Dabed

This article sheds new light on the political history of legal-constitutional developments in Palestine in the fourteen years following the Oslo Accord. It examines the relationship between the unfolding social, political, and economic context in which they arose, on the one hand, and PA law-making and legal praxis, on the other. Focusing on the evolution of the Palestinian Basic Law and constitutional regime, the author argues that the “Palestinian constitutional process” was a major “battlefield” for the actors of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Thus, changes in the actors' political strategies at various junctures were mirrored in legal-constitutional forms, specifically in the political structure of the PA. In that sense, the constitutional order can be understood as a sort of “metaphoric representation” of Palestinian politics, reflecting, among other things, the colonial nature of the Palestinian context that the Oslo process only rearticulated. This perspective is also essential for understanding the evolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict after Oslo.


2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-234
Author(s):  
Craig Douglas Albert

One of the more interesting aspects of world concern during “Operation Iraqi Freedom” was how to incorporate Iraq’s Kurdish population into an American military strategy. Furthermore, as the war was winding down, and the United States and Iraq began to construct a new Iraqi state, government, and Constitutional regime, the focus shifted on what role would the Kurds play in the new government, or even if they should be included in a government. But for most policy-makers, it was unclear who were the Kurds. How were they different than the other ethnic and religious populations of Iraq and the region generally? What was their history with the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein? The purpose of this paper is to provide answers to these most important questions through the lens of Political Science. As Iraq continues to form its new identity, it is important to understand what constitutes the identity of one of its most prominent ethnic groups, the Kurds. In tracing and describing Kurdish ethnic attributes, it is also important to delineate the history between the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein, how Iraqi identity was constructed in opposition to Kurdish identity (often oppressing it), and to understand the tense relationship between the two, a relationship that is most aptly described as having a history of violence.


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