Theunis Roux

There have been two significant developments in comparative constitutional studies over the last decade. First, the rise of authoritarian populism in Europe and the Americas has produced an outpouring of literature on the causes of this phenomenon and what can be done to protect constitutional democracies against it. Second, after a long and mysterious delay, the Global South critique has finally arrived in the field – hauling it kicking and screaming into, not quite the twenty-first century, rather something more like the 1980s in the humanities after Edward Said’s intervention – with a lot of ground still to make up.

Ben Schonthal

I fear this piece will be both less and more than what is asked for.

It will be less in that I do not consider myself an expert on Global South constitutionalism, but only an observer of one slice of it: the constitutional systems of South and Southeast Asia. And my true expertise is even narrower than that. My research explores what happens when national constitutions confront another major source of normativity in nation-states: the one that Hirschl and Shachar have called the ‘rival’ to constitutional law, namely religion.

My comments may be more than what’s asked for in that I tend to take a wider view of comparative constitutional law than is typical at public law conferences. I am a social scientist who writes about people and topics that don’t always find their way onto the pages of the International Journal of Constitutional Law. Yes, I consider the work of judges, lawmakers and national constitutions. But I also think about Buddhist monks, protest leaders and firewalkers. For me, they are also constitutional actors—or so I hope to persuade you.

So I offer these comments with humility.

Lisa Burton Crawford

Recent decisions of the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) seem to have thrown the administrative state into crisis. A suite of recent cases have limited executive power in important ways—for example, by requiring executive action to be authorised by far more detailed legislation than has previously been required, or preventing executive agencies from performing certain functions that they have been allowed to in the past. These include the momentous decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo, 603 US ___ (2024) — in which the SCOTUS effectively overturned the doctrine of Chevron deference.

Why should Australian public lawyers be interested in these developments? What light do they cast on our own legal system, and its particular strengths and pathologies? This post explores these issues, beginning with the complex legislative framework that sustains administrative government here.

Harry Sanderson

A majority of the United States Supreme Court in June abolished Chevron deference—a doctrine which had been a cornerstone of US administrative law for 40 years. The decision was long-anticipated, but is likely to be divisive. This post explains the Court’s reasoning in Loper Bright Enterprises v Raimondo, 603 US ___ (2024) and some of its possible implications for US and Australian administrative law.

Theunis Roux

Australia is one of the few liberal democracies today without a judicially enforced bill of rights in its national constitution. Instead, the protection of rights is largely left to the democratic process. What does the US Supreme Court’s recent decision on the right to abortion in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization 597 US ___ (2022) tell us about the virtues of this approach?

Theunis Roux

Philipp Dann, Michael Riegner and Maxim Bönnemann’s edited collection of essays on The Global South and Comparative Constitutional Law constitutes a major advance in scholarly thinking on this topic. Theorising the Global South as an ‘epistemic, methodological and institutional sensibility’ (p. 3), Dann and his co-editors persuasively show …