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Asanga Welikala, Lecturer in Public Law at the School of Law, University of Edinburgh, and Acting Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Constitutional Law, visited the MCC Center for Constitutional Politics for a research seminar on common good and constitutional laws.
On 26 November, Dr. Asanga Welikala, Professor at the University of Edinburgh and Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Constitutional Law, gave a research seminar at the Center for Constitutional Politics. In his presentation, titled Constitutional Common Good Provisions: A Preliminary Survey, he provided a holistic analysis of the common good clauses in the constitutions of 41 countries under study.
The research not only looked at the number of times the concept of common good appears in constitutions, but also sought to understand why it was used in these countries, for what purpose and with what effect. Accordingly, the first strand of the research consisted of categorising constitutions that used the concept of the common good expressis verbis, according to their entry into force, regional location, form of state, and form of government, while examining the frequency of appearance of common good in constitutions.
The second part of the research aimed to examine where the concept of the common good is located within the corpus of the constitution. It makes a difference whether the concept of the common good appears in the preamble, in the fundamental principles of the constitution, in the directives, or in the rights and duties. In this respect, the research has shown that a broadly conceived literature must adopt a sufficiently multifaceted research approach to the concept of common good, because a lack of a holistic approach can easily lead to misinterpretation or arbitrary interpretation of the concept of the common good.
