The 1998 Human Rights Act (HRA) has incorporated the European Convention of Human Rights into English law. Undoubtedly, it constitutes a very important event since it purports to create a new system of rights protection. In order to achieve this aim, the act also introduces some norms empowering the courts to review acts of the legislative and executive branches. The main vehicle for this provision is Section 3 of the Act, (1) which establishes a presumption of compatibility between national legislation and rights laid out in the articles of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Such a presumption requires courts to systematically attribute to legislation and executive acts the meaning that is most consistent with the protection of rights. Article 3 has been very controversial, (2) particularly concerning the scope of the power it attributes to the courts.

Religion plays a central role at the global political level despite being often portrayed as dead, marginal, or irrelevant. The way in which it plays that role, however, is not always immediately apparent or transparent. Professor Berman's essay attempts to illustrate the various ways – direct and indirect – in which religion is still central in today's debates about international law and politics. He does that by bringing us back to the interwar period, which saw an abundant flurry of arguments about international law, nationalism, and religion. He focuses in particular on the avant-garde movement led by Georges Bataille, who called for the shaking of civil society by appealing to the destabilizing forces of the (left) sacred in opposition to the conservative forces of the (right) sacred. Bataille's key insight is that religion has a contagious energy that is far more sweeping and powerful than the mere force of Western rationality. From this viewpoint, (international) law is incapable of taming the crisis of the West and of keeping at bay the perils of religion and nationalism.

Montesquieu's lessons for modern comparative constitutional law – The Spirit of the Laws – The textual bias of normative constitutionalism – The utility of other disciplines to comparative constitutional law – Constitutions as more than mere texts

This paper is about the place of religion in Alan Brudner’s Constitutional Goods. More generally, it offers some thoughts on the place of religion in constitutional theory and political philosophy today. This theologico-political question was central for many centuries, but gradually faded as our secular age affirmed itself. Recent political and social events at the European and at the global level have firmly turned the tide.

Constitutional Goods offers an ambitious constitutional theory that challenges basic liberal ideas such as the priority of basic liberties and the inevitable disagreement between competing conceptions of the right and the good. The book has two objectives: it attempts to widen, on the one hand, the list of constitutional goods that deserve priority over other interests. On the other, it tries to bring competing conceptions of the right and the good together under an overarching umbrella defined as the 'inclusive conception'. This article attempts to show that, despite the valuable and ambitious effort, Constitutional Goodsis unlikely to convince everyone of its capacity for inclusiveness.

Proportionality review and, in particular, ad hoc judicial balancing of competing rights and interests are probably the most celebrated tools propagated by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and are currently dominant features of the European discourse on rights. This methodology and its discourse, in fact, have gained such widespread popularity that, although the outcome of Convention-based and other fundamental rights claims is often far from certain, the way they will be treated by judges can be predicted with some confidence.