constitution

The impact the result of this year's general election will have on the activism of the United States Supreme Court in the years to come has been all too frequently overlooked and underappreciated by political commentators based outside of America.

However, with three Justices likely to vacate the bench in the near or immediate future, and with divisive issues such as abortion rights, affirmative action, and campaign finance reform all likely to come under the Supreme Court's scrutiny sooner rather than later, the next American president will find himself in a prime position to solidy or shift the current ideological composition of the Court will his choice of replacements.

As such, as Herman Schwartz from the Nation discusses in detail, the choice voters make at the ballot box in November will have repercussions for future generations of Americans in the realm of social values equally if not more profound as the economic legacy which will inevitably follow the current volatility in the financial markets.

As Turkey's ruling Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (Justice and Development Party / AKP) prepares to lay out its defence today against the Turkish constitutional court's attempts to shut it down, Ipek Kuran argues that the court case is a chance for the AKP to prove its secular credentials. Much of the western press has painted the ongoing legal wrangle as one pitting the politically-motivated secularist judiciary against the democratically-elected Islamists of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's party. But in the eyes of many Turks, Erdogan's party has dallied too long in the controversial arena of symbols, playing majoritarian politics in spite of the law.