Constitutional Courts under Pressure

The subject of this research is how the national constitutional courts (or other high courts having competence for constitutional/judicial review of statutes or other normative legal acts) as well as the European courts cope with the problems just recently have been raised like terrorism, multiculturalism or migration. The basic concept is to examine how these courts reflect to these challenges: whether they have changed their jurisprudence or used the well-established tools and instruments. The international research project examines also whether their legal status (competence, organization) has changed or not. The key normative questions are that how far the adaptation is necessary in constitutional adjudication in order to meet new challenges and whether contemporary tendencies lead to the need to redefine certain basic ideas about constitutional justice and the role of constitutional adjudication.

All these issues are explored from a comparative perspective inviting distinguished scholars from France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Spain, and United Kingdom.

In the framework of the research program an international conference ‘Constitutional courts under pressure – financial crisis, terrorism, migration and other challenges to constitutional adjudication’ will be organized by the Faculty of Public Administration, National University of Public Service, the Institute for Legal Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Centre for Social Sciences, and the Embassy of France in Budapest in October 2015.

The national reports, the contextual and comparative papers and the results of the comparative discussion are intended to be published either in an edited book with an international publishing house or as a special volume of Acta Juridica Hungarica, the double blind peer-review law journal of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

Project Leaders: Fruzsina Gárdos-Orosz, and Prof. Zoltán Szente