# Constitutions
62 Va. J. Int’l L. 623 (2022) ♦ Note
Assessing Aspirations: Factors Influencing Modern Effects of State Aspirational Clauses in the German and Japanese Constitutions
Constitutions sometimes feature clauses listing abstract national goals with little or vague direction on how the nation should achieve these aims. These so-called “aspirational clauses” present an interesting situation where a text is adopted by drafters, but the…
J. BOLTON SMITH
59 Va. J. Int’l L. 306 (2019) ♦ Article
China’s Turn Toward Law
The picture of Chinese law that many Western scholars and commentators portray is an increasingly bleak one: since the mid-2000s, China has been retreating from legal reform back into unchecked authoritarianism. This article argues that, much to the contrary…
TAISU ZHANG & TOM GINSBURG
57 Va. J. Int’l L. 493 (2018) ♦ Article
External Dimensions of the French Constitution
France lives with a tension between its internationalist and Universalist aspirations and the national preoccupations of its domestic politics. On the one hand, international treaties prevail over ordinary domestic legislation. On the other hand, constitutional control…
JOHN BELL
57 Va. J. Int’l L. 621 (2018) ♦ Article
The American Founding and Global Justice: Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian Approaches
On one conventional account, a constitution is quintessentially a national affair. It constitutes the state for a particular polity, creating the various organs and branches of government, defining the powers that they exercise, and setting forth the procedural…
DAVID GOLOVE
57 Va. J. Int’l L. 679 (2018) ♦ Article
Vulnerable Insiders: Constitutional Design, International Law, and the Victims of Internal Armed Conflict in Colombia
This article, prepared for a conference on “The External Dimensions of Constitutions” held at the University of Cambridge in September 2016, explains how the Colombian Constitutional Court constructed a set of rights for a group of vulnerable insiders…
DAVID LANDAU
57 Va. J. Int’l L. 769 (2018) ♦ Article
Alien Citizens: Kurds and Citizenship in the Turkish Constitution
Kurds are the largest minority ethnic group in Turkey. Most Kurds share the common religion of Islam with Turks, but they also have a distinct language, culture, and history. Turkey’s current Constitution, drafted after a military coup in 1980, is thoroughly…
OZAN O. VAROL
57 Va. J. Int’l L. 325 (2018) ♦ Article
Legislating Transnational Jurisdiction
Many scholars have observed, discussed, and debated Congressional interpretation of the Constitution. But few have considered Congress’s power to interpret the Constitution in an increasingly important context: constitutional personal jurisdiction in transnational cases…
AARON D. SIMOWITZ
57 Va. J. Int’l L. 95 (2017) ♦ Article
Germany’s German Constitution
Comparative lawyers, working with blunt taxonomies such as “legal families,” have been satisfied with characterizing Germany as representative or a member of the “Germanic-Roman” law tradition. The life of the Federal Republic’s post-war legal culture, however…
RUSSELL A. MILLER
61 Va. J. Int’l L. 325 (2021) ♦ Note
Twenty-Six Amendments, but Only One Vote: Single Subject Rule as a Constitutional Defense Mechanism Against Democratic Decline
Many Turkish and foreign commentators lauded Turkey’s 2010 constitutional referendum as a step in the right direction towards a stronger and more robust democracy. However, because this packaged referendum represented twenty-six separate amendments…
SARAH HOUSTON
58 Va. J. Int’l L. 31 (2018) ♦ Article
Stealth Theocracy
Theocracies are typically thought to be born through constitutional revolution, not evolution. This Article explores a subtler phenomenon of constitutional transformation involving the place of religion in a constitutional order through less transparent means…
YVONNE TEW
57 Va. J. Int’l L. 515 (2018) ♦ Article
The External Dimensions of Constitutions
Constitutions are traditionally seen as inherently domestic documents, written by the people, for the people, and reflecting the nation’s highest values. Yet, constitutions also have important external dimensions. Constitutions define the territory of the nation. They…
EYAL BENVENISTI & MILA VERSTEEG
57 Va. J. Int’l L. 657 (2018) ♦ Article
Constitution in the World: The External Dimensions of South Africa’s Post-Apartheid Constitution
While South Africa’s post-apartheid constitution is often heralded as a model for other countries, particularly in Africa, the xenophobic attacks on foreigners in South Africa and the failure of South African foreign policy to support the progressive development of human…
HEINZ KLUG
57 Va. J. Int’l L. 735 (2018) ♦ Article
Israel’s External Constitution: Friends, Enemies, and the Constitutional/Administrative Law Distinction
When do we decide to extraterritorially apply constitutional law and when to extraterritorially apply administrative law? Using Israel as a case study, this Article examines the applicability of its constitutional law dealing with human rights to the Occupied…
ADAM SHINAR
57 Va. J. Int’l L. 799 (2018) ♦ Article
Sovereignty and Beyond: The Double Edge of External Constitutionalism
This paper argues that the emergence and augmentation of the external dimension of state constitutional law is best understood as part of a broader process of the constitutionalization of state sovereignty since the eighteenth century. That gradual…
NEIL WALKER
57 Va. J. Int’l L. 1 (2017) ♦ Article
Constitutional Design Two Ways: Constitutional Drafters as Judges
Constitutional scholarship often assumes a strict separation between processes of constitutional drafting and interpretation. Yet on constitutional courts around the world, the judges charged with interpreting a constitution’s text are often the same people who…
ROSALIND DIXON