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How to Compare the Length of Lines to the Weight of Stones: Balancing and the Resolution of Value Conflicts in Constitutional Law

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

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The principle of proportionality is on the rise. A growing number of constitutional and international courts refer to some form of proportionality in their jurisprudence. At the same time, the principle is receiving more and more attention in international legal scholarship. Yet proportionality has not remained uncontested. In particular, some scholars have severely criticized the core of the proportionality test, which involves a balancing of competing values. This balancing is accused of being irrational because it requires placing incommensurable values on the same scale. In a famous dictum, Judge Scalia once claimed that balancing competing constitutional values is like determining “whether a particular line is longer than a particular rock is heavy.”

Type
Part B: Technique, Doctrine and Internal Logic of Constitutional Reasoning
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by German Law Journal GbR 

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Just as the piercing of my hypothetical armor by a bullet scarcely demonstrates that bullets and armor are basically the same thing … so too does the ability to point out that rights are frequently or occasionally pierced by mere interests … scarcely demonstrates that deontological rights and consequentialist interests are interestingly reducible to the same coin.

Id.

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