This dissertation analyzes the contextual background, drafting history, text, original understanding, interpretive evolution, and contemporary judicial application of the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. The dissertation develops the argument that as originally understood, the Second Amendment protected a right to keep and bear arms closely linked to and dependent upon service in the lawfully established militia. Two recent United States Supreme Court decisions, Heller v. District of Columbia and MacDonald v. City of Chicago, depart from this original understanding and recognize a constitutional right to weapons possession for purposes of purely private self-defense - particularly self-defense in the home. The dissertation recognizes that there are grounds for recognizing such a right, and that these include natural law, substantive due process, procedural due process, the Ninth Amendment, and emanations from particular provisions in the Bill of Rights including the Second Amendment. At the same time, the dissertation develops the case that the original public understanding mode of interpretation avowedly applied by the Supreme Court in its recent right to arms decisions relies on untenable "law office" history to justify results not dictated by the text, structure, or original understanding of the Constitution or by prior Supreme Court precedent.

Standard explanations of judicial behaviour (i.e. legal, rational-choice, attitudinal, and institutional models) are overly static and exogenous, interested in instances of sudden change in judicial behaviour, as triggered by appointments, legal reforms, or shifts in the political context. While these models are useful in understanding the external incentives affecting judicial behaviour, they are unsuitable for explaining sustained judicial empowerment beyond temporary strategic calculations. In response, recent 'ideational' approaches, especially studying constitutional courts, highlight the importance of judges' ideas about their role - not their ideologies or policy preferences - in instilling a mission, rather than an incentive-oriented view of the judicial function. Yet, despite their more dynamic approaches, those methods have overlooked how ideational change in the 'outside' world translates into change 'inside' this type of courts. Due to those limitations, this study proposes a complementary explanation of judicial empowerment: a theory of informal mandates and endogenous empowerment. Viewed through this lens, change and variation in judicial empowerment within and across cases are explained by the construction, expansion, and endurance - or absence and collapse - of collective internal understandings of the court's role and mission. Such understandings are developed as legal doctrines and articulated under broader informal mandates by 'mission leaders'. Gradually, these informal mandates can expand and gather majority support from strategic partnerships formed between 'mission leaders' and 'supporting leaders' - usually justices with high seniority. The more these informal mandates expand and endure inside the court, the less exogenous factors and strategic incentives over-determine its behaviour in the long-run. Judicial empowerment, thus, is better understood as a process that develops and expands gradually, endogenously, and informally, with a mission-oriented purpose. The theory is applied in the constitutional tribunals of Costa Rica, Chile, and Uruguay from 1990 to 2016. These countries have similar rule-of-law conditions, but their constitutional tribunals differ considerably in the strength and endurance of their informal mandates and, as a result, have attained different levels of judicial empowerment.

Les choix réalisés par les parlementaires dans l’exercice de leurs fonctions sont le résultat d’une analyse des motivations des citoyens. La morale est de plus en plus invoquée au sein de la sphère politique. De la vision portée sur le monde dépend la stabilité d’un système politique car une crise de moralité peut tout bouleverser. Les religions ne sont plus les premières sources de conduites, les mœurs non plus, et l’altérité n’est plus d’aucun secours. L’être humain est plus que jamais en quête d’un idéal. La référence à une norme supérieure pourrait-elle être remplacée par la référence à une norme suprême ? C’est sous ce vocable qu’apparaît la constitution dont l’importance va alors au-delà de l’impact normatif. Le droit constitutionnel et le droit parlementaire sont étroitement liés. Les citoyens ont non seulement besoin de définir la place du parlement au prisme d’une aspiration idéalisée, mais aussi que le rôle du parlement doit s’y conformer autant que possible. La difficulté est alors de savoir si la vie parlementaire doit immuablement s’accorder aux règles constitutionnelles ou si à l’inverse la construction évolutive des pratiques parlementaires doit guider des mutations constitutionnelles. Le pouvoir législatif exercé par les parlementaires dépend des fondements juridiques de leurs prérogatives mais aussi des éléments qui fondent leurs choix ainsi que les conséquences qui y sont attachées. Autrement dit, écrire la loi est un phénomène qui présente nécessairement des antécédents. Ces éléments peuvent être appréhendés sous forme de documents. Ainsi le sujet s’intitule : « Documents parlementaires et écriture de la loi » / The choices made by parliamentarians in the exercise of their functions are the result of an analysis of the motivations of citizens. Morality is more and more invoked within the political sphere. The vision of the world depends on the stability of a political system because a crisis of morality can upset everything. Religions are no longer the first sources of conduct, nor is morality and otherness no longer helpful. The human being is more than ever in search of an ideal. Could the reference to a higher standard be replaced by the reference to a supreme standard? It is under this term that the constitution appears whose importance goes beyond the normative impact. Constitutional law and parliamentary law are closely linked. Citizens not only need to define the place of parliament through the lens of an idealized aspiration, but also that the role of parliament must conform as much as possible to it. The difficulty is then to know if the parliamentary life must immutably agree to the constitutional rules or if conversely the evolutionary construction of the parliamentary practices must guide constitutional changes. Legislative power exercised by parliamentarians depends on the legal basis of their prerogatives but also on the elements that underpin their choices and the consequences attached to them. In other words, writing the law is a phenomenon that necessarily has antecedents. These elements can be apprehended as documents. The subject is entitled "Parliamentary documents and the writing of the law"

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This thesis aims to assess the role played by disagreement in the High Court???s constitutional law decisions. It does so firstly by considering the theoretical arguments in favour of allowing expression of dissent and those which urge judicial restraint and observance of precedential values. The tensions between change and conformity, and also the individual and institutional aspects of adjudication, intersect when the Court divides. The complex nature of disagreement on a multimember judicial body is further examined in the context of devising an empirical methodology for the quantification of dissent on the High Court. The thesis selects a period of a little over twenty years for detailed examination. Within that timeframe, it measures the prevalence and nature of disagreement amongst the Justices of the Court, with particular emphasis upon constitutional cases. From these results, various streams of opinion are examined for subsequent significance. In particular, the thesis contrasts the practice of persistent dissent from the Court???s approach to an issue, with those occasions when a minority Justice yields to the demands of stare decisis. The impact of dissent upon the development of the Court???s constitutional interpretation is evaluated. Although the study finds that direct reversals in the law in favour of an earlier dissent occur very rarely, it argues that dissents may still exercise a powerful influence on the Court???s pronouncements. The contribution which minority opinions make to judicial deliberation is to inevitably alter the context of the Court???s decision. Consideration of two specific case studies illustrates that this may result in the law taking a more moderate path or may actually lead to greater efforts by a majority to strengthen the cogency of its approach. In either scenario, dissent plays a far more subtle role than suggested by the myth of a ???Great Dissenter??? and the dramatic redemption of his or her lone opinions. To only assess the value of dissenting judgments against that standard is to fail to appreciate the true nature of their influence in many cases and their importance to the work of the High Court.

<p>Huvudsyftet med detta rättsvetenskapliga examensarbete, vilket behandlar statsrätt i allmänhet och konstitutionell rätt i synnerhet, var att öka förståelsen för judikaliseringsprocessen med Lagrådet som fokus. Studien bygger på rättsdogmatisk metod: där lagar, förarbeten, praxis och doktrin legat till grund för den diskussion som avslutar uppsatsen. Studien har bland annat undersökt vad Lagrådet har för roll och funktion i lagstiftningsarbetet och hur denna har förändrats över tid. Lagrådets granskning var inledningsvis obligatorisk, men ersattes under 1970-talet med en fakultativ granskning och stadfästas som sådan i den nya regeringsformen från 1974. Författningen sanktionerar suverän statsmakt och implicerar ett avsteg från den rättssäkerhet som kommer utav autonom judiciell makt och maktdelning. Då juristernas betydelse har ökat, i och med judikaliseringen, har också behovet av kontrollorgan – såsom Lagrådet – ökat. Som en följd härav bör vi återgå till den obligatoriska lagrådsgranskningen. Detta uppnås genom att den fakultativa bör-regeln slopas och ersätts med en obligatorisk ska-regel. Genom detta kan Lagrådets särskilda kompetens till fullo utnyttjas, företrädesvis i konstitutionella frågor.</p>

Huvudsyftet med detta rättsvetenskapliga examensarbete, vilket behandlar statsrätt i allmänhet och konstitutionell rätt i synnerhet, var att öka förståelsen för judikaliseringsprocessen med Lagrådet som fokus. Studien bygger på rättsdogmatisk metod: där lagar, förarbeten, praxis och doktrin legat till grund för den diskussion som avslutar uppsatsen. Studien har bland annat undersökt vad Lagrådet har för roll och funktion i lagstiftningsarbetet och hur denna har förändrats över tid. Lagrådets granskning var inledningsvis obligatorisk, men ersattes under 1970-talet med en fakultativ granskning och stadfästas som sådan i den nya regeringsformen från 1974. Författningen sanktionerar suverän statsmakt och implicerar ett avsteg från den rättssäkerhet som kommer utav autonom judiciell makt och maktdelning. Då juristernas betydelse har ökat, i och med judikaliseringen, har också behovet av kontrollorgan – såsom Lagrådet – ökat. Som en följd härav bör vi återgå till den obligatoriska lagrådsgranskningen. Detta uppnås genom att den fakultativa bör-regeln slopas och ersätts med en obligatorisk ska-regel. Genom detta kan Lagrådets särskilda kompetens till fullo utnyttjas, företrädesvis i konstitutionella frågor.

This dissertation argues that the idea of constitutional rights transformed Canadian constitutional law well before the entrenchment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Specifically, it locates the origins of Canada’s twentieth-century rights revolution in the constitutional thinking of scholars, lawyers, judges, and politicians at mid-century (1930-1960). Drawing on archival documents, personal papers, government reports, parliamentary debates, case law, and legal scholarship, this work traces the constitutional thought and culture that first propelled human rights and fundamental freedoms to the forefront of the Canadian legal imagination. As a work of legal history, it also seeks to revive the dormant spirit of constitutional history that once pervaded the discipline of Canadian constitutional law. The Introduction situates the chapters that follow within the emerging Canadian historiography of rights. Chapter Two traces the origins of Frank Scott’s advocacy for constitutional rights to the newer constitutional law, an approach to constitutional scholarship sparked by the social and political upheavals of the Depression, and the influence of Roscoe Pound’s sociological jurisprudence. Chapter Three explores the varied dimensions of the Second World War’s influence on the nascent idea of Canadian constitutional rights. In particular, the rapid rise of the wartime administrative state produced a rights discourse that tended to reflect the interests of property while ignoring the civil liberties of unpopular minorities. Chapter Four examines the rise of a politics and scholarship of rights in the years immediately following the war. In response to international rights ideals and continuing domestic rights controversies, scholars and lawyers sought to produce a theory of Canadian constitutional law that could accommodate the addition of judicially-enforced individual rights. If not entirely successful, their efforts nonetheless further reoriented the fundamental tenets of Canadian constitutional law. Chapter Five reveals the influence of Canada’s emerging constitutional culture of rights on the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of Canada, particularly Justice Ivan Rand and his conception of an implied bill of rights. Together, these chapters demonstrate the confluence of ideology, circumstance, and personality – the constitutional history – that altered the future of Canadian constitutional law.

The Supreme Court case, Gonzales v. Raich (2005), ruled medical marijuana use, authorized by the State of California, was subject to federal prosecution and regulation under the interstate commerce clause.

This thesis examines the recently decided Supreme Court case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The case regards campaign finance reform, and has raised significant controversy recently. This thesis will evaluate the arguments from both the dissent and the majority opinions, contextualize these arguments with respect to the history of campaign finance reform and the history of the legislation with regard to corporations, and will ultimately pass judgment on whether the Court was correct in its decision. Implications for the post-Citizens world will also be considered.