Convocatoria para Integrar Grupo de Investigación
Call for Students and Professors
to join the
Constitutional Reasoning Research Group
Objectives
Concerns
regarding the lack of coherent and well-founded judicial decision-making seem
to be present in every constitutional culture. Even in countries, where constitutional
review is a highly esteemed institution of the constitutional system with long
history, the reason-giving practice of the courts, and especially the high
courts have been in the focus of scholarly attention and critics. Moreover, in
many countries the widely acknowledged importance
of giving a consistent, well-founded justification is still lacking. One way of
raising the awareness about the importance of reasons and justification in
legal decision-making, lies in the hands of scholars, through confronting the
judges with their mistakes or inconsistencies in their reason-giving practice.
The most effective democratic control of the courts is publicity. Public
pressure can make a change if there is an ongoing public debate that is
supported by responsible and objective critical opinions formed in good faith about
the practice of courts. A deep analysis of the reasoning and the interpretation
of the courts’ jurisprudence is needed for authentic and responsible public
debate. However this area is still under-researched. Therefore the Research
Group aims at starting a scientifically and theoretically grounded research
that is focused on the most important decisions of the Ecuadorian
Constitutional Court.
The Research
Group is going to explore what reasons exactly are given to justify CC decisions,
what type of interpretation the CC uses, what is the nature of the reasoning
the decisions contain and what general patterns are possible to be drawn from
these findings. In order to guarantee the availability of our research, to raise
the level of publicity and through this to contribute to the quality of the
public debate, we would like to publish our results online. This intention of
ours corresponds to the underlying purpose of the project, which is to
contribute to the common good through the support of a responsible and honest
public debate.
Method
In order
to increase the authenticity of our results, the Research Group will use both descriptive
methods based on empirical data and theoretical, prescriptive analysis. We are
going to research Constitutional Court decisions from every field of law,
trying to deal with those that represent the highest capacity of relevance for
the research. The Research Group lays emphasis not only on the strictly
understood legal and constitutional aspects, but opens up to political,
philosophical and language issues as well. Therefore we intend to cooperate
with other relevant faculties, as well as other universities in this project.
The
Research Group aims at functioning in two languages, in Spanish and in English.
On the one hand Spanish is indispensable for gathering and researching CC decisions,
and also to help the constitutional dialogue, which is basically in Spanish.
However, in the scholarly field the research could have a considerably greater
potential if the results are published in English as well. By using English as
a working language we can enter the comparative constitutional discourse more
effectively, where Ecuador could gain more representation.
Practical information
The
members of the Research Group are primarily students and professors of the Law
School of Universidad San Francisco de Quito. Secondarily, the Research Group
is open for professors of other faculties and other universities too. The ongoing
tasks and the time schedule of the project will be discussed in the regular
meetings of the Research Group; the date of the first, founding meeting is
going to be specified by email as we approach the beginning of the academic
year 2016-2017.
The scope
of the researched CC decisions, the research method, the tasks to be assigned
and the time scale of the research project will be specified soon after the
compound of the Research Group is fixed.
If you are interested in being member of the
Constitutional Reasoning Research Group, join us by sending an email until
September 12!
Prof.
Johanna Fröhlich, Faculty of Jurisprudence, USFQ. (frohlijoh@gmail.com, or jfrohlich@asig.com.ec)
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