RONALD J. KROTOSZYNSKI, The University of Alabama School of Law
Email: rkrotoszynski@law.ua.edu

The U.S. Constitution and the U.S. iteration of constitutionalism have been highly influential in the rest of the world. A written constitution, federalism, judicial review, and a written bill of rights are common characteristics of many constitutions adopted since World War II. In one key respect, however, the U.S. model has not found many takers: separation of executive and legislative powers. The United States maintains a strong separation of legislative and executive powers - a state of affairs that is very unusual, at least when viewed from the perspective of most of Europe, Canada, and a good number of other democracies elsewhere (e.g., Israel, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand). The Constitution itself and the Framers clearly feared that combining executive and legislative powers would be conducive to "tyranny" and should, accordingly, not be permitted. The essay posits that the U.S. concern with separating and dividing executive and legislative power stems from a more generalized skepticism toward government and government institutions than exists in most other democracies. The essay also suggests that, notwithstanding the obvious downside of making government action more difficult by requiring the separate concurrence of the President (or a supermajority of the Congress), this arrangement provides an important structural benefit by facilitating a separate political review of legislative policies. Judicial review is an important and useful way of securing constitutional government; executive review of legislative policies, which may be more wide-ranging than judicial review, also helps to secure good governance.

KAI MÖLLER, University of Oxford - Faculty of Law
Email: kai.moller@law.ox.ac.uk

In the jurisprudence of constitutional courts around the world, there is an emerging trend towards an autonomy-based understanding of constitutional rights: increasingly, rights are interpreted as being about enabling people to live autonomous lives, rather than disabling the state in certain ways. This essay investigates the conception of autonomy employed by courts by presenting two candidates and examining which of them explains better the current practice of constitutional rights law. The first, labelled the excluded reasons conception of autonomy, claims that a person's autonomy is violated if he is treated on the basis of certain impermissible - in particular moralistic or paternalistic - reasons. It is concluded that while this is a coherent understanding of autonomy, it cannot explain many of the rights which are widely accepted today. The second, the protected interests conception, argues that a person has autonomy interests in controlling certain domains of her life, and offers a scale on which the importance of the various autonomy interests can be assessed. The essay demonstrates that this conception is coherent and adequately explains the current practice. The final section briefly explores some implications of this result for a comprehensive reconstructive theory of constitutional rights.

SALADIN MECKLED-GARCIA, School of Public Policy/Department Political Science, University College London
Email: s.meckled-garcia@ucl.ac.uk

The paper engages the conceptual question of the nature of rights. First, moral methodology for developing criteria to judge the adequacy of theories for the concept of rights is discussed. Standard methodologies for conceptual theory, such as analysis of language practices, appealing to intuitions to test and correct hypotheses, and mixtures of these with appeals to substantive moral values, are shown to fail in important ways to give us reasons to adopt one or another view of the concept. An alternative methodology is proposed which appeals to the distinct role of concepts in our value scheme (the added value of being able to employ such concepts in our moral judgments). This is then used to develop criteria for a successful theory of rights. Two existing theories are shown, as a matter of illustration, to fail to satisfy the criteria, and finally an alternative theory of rights which does satisfy these criteria is proposed and defended.

LORENZO ZUCCA, King's College London School of Law
Email: lorenzo.zucca@kcl.ac.uk

This contribution includes three papers by Guillermo Lariguet, Silvina Alvarez, and David Martinez Zorrilla on the topic of Constitutional Dilemmas sparked by the publication of Lorenzo Zucca's book with the same title. The authors engage in a discussion of the main theses of the book including the very notion of dilemmas and their relevance for legal reasoning; the question of conflicts of fundamental rights in theory and practice; the notion of incommensurability and its relevance in the definition of conflicts of rights; and many other issues. The three papers are completed by a reply by Zucca who takes on board criticisms in order to revise his own position.