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Constitutional Law in Practice: Regional Perspectives

Overview

Module description

Designed to pull together expertise on diverse jurisdictions, this module is taught by several members of staff as well as invited professors and its syllabus varies from year to year reflecting contemporary developments. Each week, with the help of a specialist and materials available online in advance, you will discover how perennial problems that constitutionalism is meant to address persist in a diverse range of polities across the globe.

Indicative module syllabus

  • Focus on the UK: Brexit
  • European Union in Crisis
  • The Russian Constitutional System: Complexity and Asymmetry
  • Constitutional Crisis in Central and Eastern Europe
  • Focus on the Americas: Constitutionalism and Non-Human Rights in the Americas
  • Multi-nationalism, Multiculturalism and Multiplicity: The Canadian Case
  • Focus on Turkey: Authoritarian Constitutionalism?
  • Focus on the Islamic Republic of  Iran: Revolution and Religion
  • Focus on South Africa: How Political Emancipation and a Progressive Constitution Have Not Delivered Social Justice
  • Focus on Australia: Colonial Legacies
  • Focus on Israel: Basic Laws, Religion and Ethnicity
  • Focus on Greece: Constitutionalism and the Sovereign-Debt Crisis

Learning objectives

By the end of this module, you will be able to:

  • demonstrate knowledge of the constitutional history and current practice in selected countries, regions and supra-state entities
  • critically appraise the function of constitutionalist discourse in the justification of prevailing political and economic models, state-to-state interventions (nation-building, aid conditionality etc), situations of constitutional ‘exceptionalism’ (i.e. declarations of states of emergency, coups d’états) etc
  • engage in the comparative study of constitutional adjudication through specific, in-depth case studies from a range of countries.