Susan Rose-Ackerman Co-Authors Book on the Law of Lawmaking
In the new book Due Process of Lawmaking: The United States, South Africa, Germany, and the European Union, co-authors Susan Rose-Ackerman, Stefanie Egidy ’11 LLM, and James Fowkes ’10 LLM, ’14 JSD examine the law of lawmaking. This comparative work deals broadly with public policymaking in the legislative and executive branches.
Due Process considers three aspects of public legitimacy: democracy, the protection of rights, and competence. These three facets overlap and conflict, in practice, and each system deals with the tension in different ways. Drawing on the insights of positive political economy, the authors attempt to explain the differences and to explicate the ways in which courts uphold these principles in the different systems. Judicial review in the American presidential system suggests lessons for the parliamentary systems in Germany and South Africa, while the experience of parliamentary government yields potential insights into the reform of the American law of lawmaking. Taken together, the national experiences shed light on the special case of the EU. In dialogue with each other, the case studies demonstrate the interplay between constitutional principles and political imperatives under a range of different conditions.
“Our book arose from conversations between the three of us when Stefanie and James were students at Yale Law School. I was struck by constitutional law decisions in Germany and South Africa that differed quite sharply from the American approach, and I sought help from them to understand the differences,” said Professor Rose-Ackerman. “We added the EU to our project because one cannot study current legal developments in Germany without including the EU. What began as an effort to write a law review article soon burgeoned into the book that we published this January. It is, for me, a wonderful strength of our graduate program that the faculty has the opportunity to work with such gifted students—who are now becoming established themselves as academics and lawyers.”
Susan Rose-Ackerman is the Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence (Law and Political Science) with joint appointments between Yale Law School and the Yale Department of Political Science. She has taught and written widely on corruption, law and development, administrative law, law and regulatory policy, the nonprofit sector, and federalism. Her previous books are Corruption and Government: Causes, Consequences and Reform, which has been translated into 17 languages, and From Elections to Democracy: Building Accountable Government in Hungary and Poland. Professor Rose-Ackerman is currently a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin where she is continuing her work in comparative public law.
Stefanie Egidy ’11 LLM studied law and European law at the universities of Würzburg, Germany, and Bergen, Norway. Egidy is currently completing her doctoral dissertation on the constitutional problems of financial market stabilization in financial crises at the University of Würzburg under the supervision of Helmuth Schulze-Fielitz, while working as a research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, Germany.
James Fowkes ’10 LLM, ’14 JSD clerked at the South African Constitutional Court in 2008 and has held research fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, Hamburg and the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg, Germany. He is currently Senior Researcher at the Institute for International and Comparative Law in Africa at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He has published articles in the South African Journal on Human Rights, the Constitutional Court Review, and the Cambridge Journal of International and Public Law.
Due Process of Lawmaking is published by Cambridge University Press.
