Puerto Rico’s Constitutional Paradox
Puerto Rico’s Constitutional Paradox

Author: Jorge M Farinacci-Fernós

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2023-02-23

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 1509953485

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This book explains how the People of Puerto Rico managed to adopt a constitution whose content and process were both original and colonialist, participatory and undemocratic, as well as progressive and anticlimactic. It looks in detail at the rich contradictions of the Puerto Rican constitutional experience, focusing on the history and content of the 1952 Constitution. This constitution is the only constitutional document written by the Puerto Rican People themselves after more than 500 years of Spanish and US colonialism. By exploring Puerto Rico's unique history and constitutional experience the book shines a spotlight on key emerging themes of comparative constitutional studies in this area: state constitutionalism, the persistence of colonial relationships in the Caribbean, and the continued development of constitutionalism in Latin America. The book delves deep into the particular experience of Puerto Rican constitutionalism which combines elements of colonialism, democratic tensions, and progressive policies. It explains how these features converge in a constitutional project that has endured for 70 years and continues its contradictory development. It considers issues such as the island's colonial history, including its conflicting relationship with democratic values and the constant presence of social movements and their struggles. It also explores the content of the 1952 Constitution, focusing on its progressive substantive policy, particularly its rights provisions, its amendment procedures, and the governmental structure it set up.

Constitutional Politics in Multinational Democracies
Constitutional Politics in Multinational Democracies

Author: André Lecours

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2021-07-15

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 0228007461

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Constitutional politics is exceptionally intense and unpredictable. It involves negotiations over the very nature of the state and the implications of self- determination. Multinational democracies face pressing challenges to the existing order because they are composed of communities with distinct cultures, histories, and aspirations, striving to coexist under mutually agreed-upon terms. Conflict over the recognition of these multiple identities and the distribution of power and resources is inevitable and, indeed, part of what defines democratic life in multinational societies. In Constitutional Politics in Multinational Democracies André Lecours, Nikola Brassard-Dion, and Guy Laforest bring together experts on multinational democracies to analyze the claims of minority nations about their political future and the responses they elicit through constitutional politics. Essays focus on the nature of these states and the actors and political process within them. This framework allows for a multidimensional examination of crucial political periods in these democracies by assessing what constitutional politics is, who is involved in it, and how it happens. Case studies include Catalonia and Spain, Puerto Rico and the United States, Scotland and the United Kingdom, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Quebec and the Métis People in Canada. Theoretically significant and empirically rich, Constitutional Politics in Multinational Democracies is a necessary read for any student of multinationalism.

Constitutional Violence
Constitutional Violence

Author: Antoni Abat i Ninet

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2014-08-20

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 074867537X

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Western political systems tend to be 'constitutional democracies', dividing the system into a domain of politics, where the people rule, and a domain of law, set aside for a trained elite. Antoni Abat i Ninet strives to resolve these apparently exclusive

Constitutional Reasoning in Latin America and the Caribbean
Constitutional Reasoning in Latin America and the Caribbean

Author: Johanna Fröhlich

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-09-05

Total Pages: 615

ISBN-13: 150996018X

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This book examines the reasoning practice of 15 constitutional courts and supreme courts, including the Caribbean Commonwealth and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Enriched by empirical data, with which it strives to contribute to a constructive and well-informed debate, the volume analyses how Latin American courts justify their decisions. Based on original data and a region-specific methodology, the book provides a systematic analysis utilising more than 600 leading cases. It shows which interpretive methods and concepts are most favoured by Latin American courts, and which courts were the most prolific in their reasoning activities. The volume traces the features of judicial dialogue on a regional and sub-regional level and enables the evaluation and comparison of each country's reasoning culture in different epochs. The collection includes several graphs to visualise the changes and tendencies of the reasoning practices throughout time in the region, based on information gathered from the dataset. To better understand the current functioning and the future tendencies of courts in Latin America and the Caribbean, the volume illuminates how constitutional and supreme courts have actually been making their decisions in the selected landmark cases, which could also contribute to future successful litigation strategies for both national constitutional courts and the Inter-American Court for Human Rights. This project was made possible due to the collaboration and funding provided by the Rule of Law Programme for Latin America of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation and the Law School of the University of San Francisco de Quito.

Almost Citizens
Almost Citizens

Author: Sam Erman

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1108415490

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Tells the tragic story of Puerto Ricans who sought the post-Civil War regime of citizenship, rights, and statehood but instead received racist imperial governance.

Foreign in a Domestic Sense
Foreign in a Domestic Sense

Author: Christina Duffy Burnett

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2001-07-20

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 0822381168

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In this groundbreaking study of American imperialism, leading legal scholars address the problem of the U.S. territories. Foreign in a Domestic Sense will redefine the boundaries of constitutional scholarship. More than four million U.S. citizens currently live in five “unincorporated” U.S. territories. The inhabitants of these vestiges of an American empire are denied full representation in Congress and cannot vote in presidential elections. Focusing on Puerto Rico, the largest and most populous of the territories, Foreign in a Domestic Sense sheds much-needed light on the United States’ unfinished colonial experiment and its legacy of racially rooted imperialism, while insisting on the centrality of these “marginal” regions in any serious treatment of American constitutional history. For one hundred years, Puerto Ricans have struggled to define their place in a nation that neither wants them nor wants to let them go. They are caught in a debate too politicized to yield meaningful answers. Meanwhile, doubts concerning the constitutionality of keeping colonies have languished on the margins of mainstream scholarship, overlooked by scholars outside the island and ignored by the nation at large. This book does more than simply fill a glaring omission in the study of race, cultural identity, and the Constitution; it also makes a crucial contribution to the study of American federalism, serves as a foundation for substantive debate on Puerto Rico’s status, and meets an urgent need for dialogue on territorial status between the mainlandd and the territories. Contributors. José Julián Álvarez González, Roberto Aponte Toro, Christina Duffy Burnett, José A. Cabranes, Sanford Levinson, Burke Marshall, Gerald L. Neuman, Angel R. Oquendo, Juan Perea, Efrén Rivera Ramos, Rogers M. Smith, E. Robert Statham Jr., Brook Thomas, Richard Thornburgh, Juan R. Torruella, José Trías Monge, Mark Tushnet, Mark Weiner

Reproducing Empire
Reproducing Empire

Author: Laura Briggs

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2003-01-20

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 9780520936317

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Original and compelling, Laura Briggs's Reproducing Empire shows how, for both Puerto Ricans and North Americans, ideologies of sexuality, reproduction, and gender have shaped relations between the island and the mainland. From science to public policy, the "culture of poverty" to overpopulation, feminism to Puerto Rican nationalism, this book uncovers the persistence of concerns about motherhood, prostitution, and family in shaping the beliefs and practices of virtually every player in the twentieth-century drama of Puerto Rican colonialism. In this way, it sheds light on the legacies haunting contemporary debates over globalization. Puerto Rico is a perfect lens through which to examine colonialism and globalization because for the past century it has been where the United States has expressed and fine-tuned its attitudes toward its own expansionism. Puerto Rico's history holds no simple lessons for present-day debate over globalization but does unearth some of its history. Reproducing Empire suggests that interventionist discourses of rescue, family, and sexuality fueled U.S. imperial projects and organized American colonialism. Through the politics, biology, and medicine of eugenics, prostitution, and birth control, the United States has justified its presence in the territory's politics and society. Briggs makes an innovative contribution to Puerto Rican and U.S. history, effectively arguing that gender has been crucial to the relationship between the United States and Puerto Rico, and more broadly, to U.S. expansion elsewhere.

Confronting Fiji Futures
Confronting Fiji Futures

Author: A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi

Publisher: ANU Press

Published: 2016-01-15

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1921934301

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Fiji, post-independence, has seen several governments, two military coups and, amidst sweeping social, economic and political changes, the presence of divisive identity politics in its journey towards a united, collective Fiji community. This republished edition of Confronting Fiji Futures takes in these landmark events and eventualities, and aims at a forward-looking assessment of the realities facing Fiji in the present and the future. It focuses on the period of the coups up to and including the 1999 general elections, when an explicitly multiethnic party won government in a surprise landslide result. This book is the result of a collaborative research project based at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, in the Netherlands — an institution with a long tradition of collaborative teaching, research and advisory services in the South Pacific region. It aims to present a range of relevant issues from a number of vantage points. It has brought together a strong diversity of authors led by A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi, including John Cameron, Ganesh Chand, Martin Doornbos, Yash Ghai, Holger Korth, Sunil Kumar, Biman Prasad, Jacqueline Leckie, Satendra Prasad, Steve Ratuva, Robbie Robertson, Ardeshir Sepehri and William Sutherland.

Mainland Passage
Mainland Passage

Author: Ramón E. Soto-Crespo

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 0816655871

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One-third of the population of Puerto Rico moved to New York City during the mid-twentieth century. Since this massive migration, Puerto Rican literature and culture have grappled with an essential change in self-perception. Mainland Passage examines the history of that transformation, the political struggle over its representation, and the ways it has been imagined in Puerto Rico and in the work of Latina/o fiction writers. Ramón E. Soto-Crespo argues that the most significant consequence of this migration is the creation of a cultural and political borderland state. He intervenes in the Puerto Rico status debate to show that the two most discussed options--Puerto Rico's becoming either a fully federated state of the United States or an independent nation--represent false alternatives, and he forcefully reasons that Puerto Rico should be recognized as an anomalous political entity that does not conform to categories of political belonging. Investigating a fundamental shift in the way Puerto Rican writers, politicians, and scholars have imagined their cultural identity, Mainland Passage demonstrates that Puerto Rico's commonwealth status exemplifies a counterhegemonic logic and introduces a vital new approach to understanding Puerto Rican culture and history. "An extraordinarily effective and persuasive synthesis of political theory, historical exposition, and cultural analysis that does real justice to a topic of daunting complexity. Ramón Soto-Crespo's readings strike me as some of the best work being done now in US Latino literary criticism." --Ricardo L. Ortíz, Georgetown University "Mainland Passage is a provocative intervention into some of the most intractable problems in Puerto Rican studies." --The Americas