The Citizenship Amendment Act 2019: An Insight through Constitutional and Secularism Perspective

The primary endeavor of this paper is to illuminate the contentious Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 through the constitution and human rights jurisprudence perspective. In this paper, an attempt has been made to propose a different interpretation of the Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 which not only infracts constitutional values but also legalized the hate against minorities, especially Muslims. India—as a nation state—has always cherished and remained concerned about its secular and democratic character. Since independence, India has maintained its global position as a responsible and humane society to protect minorities’ rights and social justice. Shockingly, the legislative development that had taken place in the recent past has questioned India’s commitment toward the certain principle of human rights, democratic values, and secularism which are the hallmark of the Constitution of India. The Citizenship Amendment Act 2019 has put religion as a pre-requisite qualification if someone is desirous to apply for Indian citizenship which is purely a violation of the basic ethos of the constitution. The idea of India as envisioned by the framers of the Indian constitution as a democratic, secular, and socialist state and anything that contrary to its basic structure is unconstitutional. The contentious legislation whether unconstitutional or not needs to be examined through the prism of constitutional law and fundamental norms of human rights. In this research exercise, a modest attempt is made to examine all merits and demerits of this antagonistic citizenship legislation. Throughout the paper, the effort has been given to sustain the notion that India cannot be a republic founded on discrimination, hate, and a pervasive sense of fear.

Omnibus Law di Indonesia

This article examines the drafting of the Omnibus Law on the Job Creation Bill, the original purpose of which was to facilitate investment or accelerate the economy. Starting from the disharmony of several overlapping regulations, out of sync between one law and another in the investment sector, a universal sweeping law that contains thousands of articles is needed. This study uses the theory of the formation of laws and regulations and the perspective of legal politics, with juridical analysis, to explain how a process of drafting a law, the principles of formation, and the political dynamics that gave birth to it. This paper emphasizes that the process and politics of the Omnibus Law legislation on the Job Creation Bill has minimal public participation and is not transparent. So the legal product of the Job Creation Law is formally flawed, and materially contains articles that are capitalist in content, opening up investment for investors but on the other hand harming the people. In this study, it was also found that the Omnibus Law of the Job Creation Act was born with more character instrumentalist-oligarchic, where the government transplants the Omnibus Law solely as a short-term pragmatic option to spread the 'red carpet' for investors. In other words, the Omnibus Law fails to create an instrumentalist-democratic character, which is oriented towards fulfilling and strengthening the values ​​of the rule of law which is long-term oriented while at the same time creating a sustainable participatory-democratic climate.

Can the EU be a federal democracy? Assessing the horizontal and vertical dimension of the EU government from comparative perspective

The European Union remains an ambivalent polity. This uncertainty complicates the assessment of its democratic and federal quality. Drawing on comparative federalism research can contribute not only to making sense of whether, or rather which kind of federalism the EU has developed. It can also enable addressing such a compounded, but necessary inquiry into the federal and democratic character of the EU and how to ascertain which type of democratic government for which type of federal union may be appropriate. The article first elaborates a framework to assess the dimensions of federal and democratic government, drawing on comparative federalism research to delineate basic types of federal democracy. Here the democratic dimension of government is taken as referring primarily to the horizontal division of powers (among ‘branches’) of government, the federal dimension to the vertical division of powers (among ‘levels’) of governments. The framework is applied to the government of the EU in order to gauge its own type(s) of division of power arrangements and the interlinkage between them. Finally, the discussion reflects on whether or rather how the EU could comprise a federal democracy, especially in light of recent crisis challenges and subsequent institutional developments in EU governance.

Replies to Commentators

This chapter responds to the commentaries by Kolodny, Brooks, and Stilz by elaborating on and adding to points made in the first three chapters. In connection with Chapter 1, it addresses various aspects of the requirement to communicate respect, including the collective character of the required communication, the effectiveness and appropriateness of law as its form, the need for equal participation in crafting it, and the possibility of individual dissent from it. It also considers whether the communicative conception offers a plausible normative account of the motivations underlying democratic movements. In connection with Chapters 2 and 3, it expands on the democratic character of common law and defends the claim that states may pursue discretionary interests, arguing that this pursuit is compatible not only with specific requirements of justice but also with liberalism.

Democratic Law and the Erosion of Common Law

This chapter explores the democratic character of the common law by examining the implied contractual duty of good faith and its dismissive treatment by the US Supreme Court in Northwest v. Ginsberg, a 2014 preemption decision. The decision was mistaken because it failed to recognize law’s morally indispensable role of publicly articulating and interpreting our shared moral commitments, treating law instead as a mere means of resolving disputes. The chapter also celebrates the democratic character of common law, which, although articulated by judges, responds to reasons and problems emerging from the citizenry and attends to moral expectations embodied in customary practices. The chapter underscores the importance of common law (and the doctrine of good faith) in publicly articulating reasons and drawing on the underlying values that law serves, democratic functions that are lost when litigation is replaced by private arbitration and overlooked by a narrow focus on elections.

DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION IN “MERDEKA BELAJAR” ERA

Educational Democracy is a view of life that prioritizes equal rights and obligations as well as an equal treatment between educators and students in the learning process. Democracy in education contains elements of independence, freedom, and responsibility. An independent attitude to develop self-confidence and to be aware of one's limitations is very important to foster awareness that life in the community requires collaboration with other individuals. Freedom is defined as a life purpose that rests on the awareness of social pluralism, not solely on the interests of individuals or groups. Therefore freedom itself must be accompanied by a sense of full responsibility. The word "Educational Democracy" is two terms which are interrelated, democratic values ​​can be understood and owned by the community through educational activities, and vice versa so that education can produce output that has an independent attitude, has a critical thinking power, dynamic, democratic character and always upholds human dignity, then the implementation of education must be based on democracy so that the concept of independence in learning will grow well.

Educating Democratic Character

Many recent writers on democracy have lamented its decay and warned of its imminent death. We argue that the concerns are focused at three different levels of democracy. The most fundamental of these, celebrated by Tocqueville and by Dewey, recognizes the interactions and joint deliberations among citizens who seek sympathetic mutual engagement. Such engagement is increasingly rare in large-scale political life. In diagnosing and treating the problems, we recommend returning to the debate between Lippmann and Dewey, in which many of the concerns now prominent were already voiced. This inspires the main work of the paper – the reconstruction of Dewey’s conception of democracy as a ‘mode of associated living’. We focus on the thesis that democracy is educative and explicate Dewey’s notion of growth, showing how democratic education contributes to three important functions: the capacity for sustaining oneself, the enrichment of individual experience, and the ability to enter into cooperative discussions with fellow citizens. Dewey’s conception of democratic education is directed at fostering particular virtues and, if citizens come to possess them, the need for Lippmann’s ‘omnicompetent individual’ vanishes. We conclude by suggesting that Dewey’s project of educating democratic character is pertinent for addressing the disaffection of our times.

Peningkatan Hasil Belajar Menulis Surat Undangan Menggunakan Model Think Talk Write (TTW) dengan Penguatan Karakter Demokratis pada Siswa Kelas V SDN Kepanjenkidul 1 Kota Blitar

This study aims to describe the application of the TTW model by strengthening democratic character and describing the improvement of student learning outcomes in writing a class V invitation letter Kepanjenkidul 1 SDN Blitar City. The study was conducted with a qualitative approach to the type of classroom action research. In cycle I the percentage of teacher activity was 83 percent and increased in cycle II by 100 percent. The average percentage of student activity in the first cycle was 73 percent and increased in the second cycle by 92 percent. While the completeness of student learning outcomes at the pre-action stage was 42 percent. In cycle I the average completeness of student learning outcomes classically rose to 60.8 percent and increased in cycle II of 86.3 percent. Based on the above results it can be concluded that the application of the TTW model by strengthening democratic character can improve student learning outcomes in the material of writing an invitation letter. Abstrak: Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mendeskripsikan penerapan model TTW dengan penguatan karakter demokratis dan mendeskripsikan peningkatan hasil belajar siswa menulis surat undangan kelas V SDN Kepanjenkidul 1 Kota Blitar. Penelitian dilakukan dengan pendekatan kualitatif jenis penelitian tindakan kelas. Pada siklus I persentase aktivitas guru sebesar sebesar 83 persen dan meningkat pada siklus II sebesar 100 persen. Rata-rata persentase aktivitas siswa pada siklus I sebesar 73 persen dan meningkat pada siklus II sebesar 92 persen. Sedangkan ketuntasan hasil belajar siswa pada tahap pratindakansebesar 42 persen. Pada siklus I rata-rata ketuntasan hasil belajar siswa secara klasikal naik menjadi 60,8 persen dan meningkat pada siklus II sebesar 86,3 persen. Berdasarkan hasil di atas dapat disimpulkan bahwa penerapan model TTW dengan penguatan karakter demokratis dapat meningkatkan hasil belajar siswa dalam materi menulis surat undangan.

The Classic Arguments for Free Speech 1644–1927

This chapter examines the classic arguments for freedom of speech. It traces the first comprehensive argument for freedom of speech as a limiting principle of government to John Milton’s Areopagitica, a polemic against censorship by a requirement of prior licensing in which Milton develops an argument for the pursuit of truth through exposure to false and heretical ideas rather than the passive reception of orthodoxy. Despite Milton’s belief in the advancement of understanding through free inquiry, he was far from liberal in the modern sense of that term and he did not, for instance, extend the tolerance he advocated to Catholic religious texts. The chapter then assesses what James Madison had to say about the role of public opinion as a crucial element in the creation of political authority and the preservation of rights, and considers Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr’s opinions about the freedom of speech. It also looks at how the celebrated federal judge Learned Hand conceives of the freedom of speech as a majority-creating procedure rather than an individual right, while Justice Louis Brandeis understood the freedom of speech to be an individual liberty important as such but especially important for its contribution to democratic character. Ultimately, the most widely-read of the classic arguments for free speech is that developed by John Stuart Mill in his Essay On Liberty.

Book series “Life of remarkable people” in the creative biography of the Russian enlightener Ya. V. Abramov

The paper discusses the role of the ideologist of cultural movement in the reformist populism of the 1880s – 1890s, enlightener and writer Ya. V. Abramov in the context of creation of the book series “Life of remarkable people. Biographical library of F. Pavlenkovˮ. Its educational concept and democratic character are largely determined by Abramov’s social and worldview intentions — ideological inspirer of so-called “going to the people”, “going to great cultural work”, who saw the goals of such work in releasing “constrained forces and abilities of the Russian folk spirit”, supporting the “mental activity of the Russian people”, in promoting its “generation of new forms of life”. The author suggests a hypothesis, according to which the ideological genesis of the series is contained in Abramov’s short story “The Philistine Thinker” (1881), where the idea on the educational significance of the biographies of prominent people, “benefactors of mankind” was first expressed. The paper traces affinity between updating the genre of popular scientific biographies of “great people” and the educational tasks of Abramov and Pavlenkov and highlights the role of “instructive biographies” of Abramov in creating the genre type of documentary and fiction books that synthesize the qualities of “contextual biography” and “biography of the hermeneutic model”. The classic exemplarity of Abramov’s books is determined by the genre-conditioning and structure-forming function of the concept of personality; a synthesis of artistry and journalism, documentary and imagery; principles of artistic typing when working with documentary material; actualization of genre dominants (biography-life description, biography-research, biography-portrait, etc.); the poetics of narrative, objectivizing the aesthetic nature of author's subjectivity.