International Journal of Constitutional and Administrative Law
Focus The International Journal of Constitutional and Administrative Law (IJCAL) is a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to advancing critical, comparative, and interdisciplinary scholarship in constitutional law and administrative law, with particular attention to public-law developments in the Global South. The journal provides an academic forum for the examination of constitutional design, administrative governance, democratic accountability, institutional reform, and rights protection in emerging, transitional, and postcolonial legal systems. IJCAL places distinctive emphasis on the normative legacy of the Bandung Principles, understood not merely as a historic diplomatic milestone, but as a continuing source of constitutional values relevant to sovereignty, equality, anti-colonialism, solidarity, social justice, and public responsibility in contemporary constitutional development. In this respect, the journal welcomes contributions that explore how constitutional and administrative law in the Global South generate original legal thought, institutional innovation, and alternative normative frameworks beyond Eurocentric models of public law. The journal publishes original research articles, conceptual papers, and comparative studies that address both theoretical and practical dimensions of constitutional and administrative law. IJCAL is particularly interested in scholarship that combines doctrinal rigor with comparative, socio-legal, historical, or interdisciplinary perspectives in order to explain how constitutions and administrative institutions operate in practice across different jurisdictions. Aims promote high-quality scholarship in constitutional law and administrative law with international relevance; encourage comparative and critical studies on public-law institutions, legal reform, and governance; advance Global South perspectives in constitutional and administrative scholarship; develop scholarly engagement with Bandung-inspired constitutional values in contemporary legal discourse; and publish innovative research that strengthens understanding of institutional accountability, democratic participation, and rights protection in diverse legal systems. Subject Areas The journal welcomes manuscripts on, but not limited to, the following subject areas: constitutional change, constitutional identity, and constitutional adjudication; democracy, constitutional rights, and limitations on state power; administrative law, administrative justice, and bureaucratic accountability; institutional design, public governance, and legal reform in emerging and transitional democracies; and comparative constitutional and administrative law in the Global South, including Bandung-inspired constitutional values.
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<![CDATA[Two Rationalities of Constitutional Adjudication: Jurisdictional Expansion and Guarantist Restraint in the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court’s Coup-Plot Judgment ]]>
<![CDATA[Sander Ferreira Martinelli Nunes]]>
<![CDATA[ International Journal of Constitutional and Administrative Law Vol. 2 No. 2 (2026) ]]>
Publisher : <![CDATA[Gorontalo Legal Research and Consulting ]]>
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DOI: 10.66502/jfb5mp62
<![CDATA[This article examines the competing constitutional and procedural rationalities expressed in the opinions of Justices Alexandre de Moraes and Luiz Fux in the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court’s adjudication of the 2022-2023 coup-plot prosecution, from the acceptance of the indictment in Petition No. 12,100/DF to the merits judgment in Criminal Action No. 2668. Adopting a doctrinal and critical-analytical method, the study evaluates each opinion against three parameters: the jurisdictional architecture of Article 102 of the 1988 Constitution, the procedural guarantees of Article 5, and the fair-trial standards of Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Article 8 of the American Convention on Human Rights. The analysis identifies in the rapporteur’s reasoning a pattern of interpretive expansion operating across four dimensions: retention of original jurisdiction after the termination of the defendants’ public offices, aggregation of investigative and adjudicative functions in a single justice, a permissive threshold for evidentiary sufficiency, and an expansive construction of the offences introduced by Law No. 14,197/2021. The dissent, by contrast, rests on a narrower jurisdictional premise anchored in the binding precedent of AP 937, on strict typicity, and on an effective rather than merely formal conception of equality of arms. The article argues that these are not competing readings of the same doctrinal materials but two distinct models of constitutional adjudication, and that the Brazilian case offers a cautionary illustration of the institutional costs of democratic self-defence exercised through criminal jurisdiction.]]>
<![CDATA[Entrenchment by Interpretation: Section 25 of the South African Constitution and the Failure of Socio-Economic Redress ]]>
<![CDATA[Cwenga Mayekiso]]>
<![CDATA[ International Journal of Constitutional and Administrative Law Vol. 2 No. 2 (2026) ]]>
Publisher : <![CDATA[Gorontalo Legal Research and Consulting ]]>
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DOI: 10.66502/hdtc9308
<![CDATA[This article examines a paradox in South Africa’s post-apartheid constitutional order: a Constitution drafted to dismantle racial dispossession has become a principal legal framework through which the holdings that dispossession generated are secured. Although the 1996 Constitution is widely regarded as among the world’s most progressive, the property clause in section 25 and the doctrinal architecture built around it have narrowed the state’s practical capacity to effect structural socio-economic change. The article argues that this outcome is not the product of judicial partiality toward landowners, which the case law does not support, but the cumulative effect of four mechanisms: an expropriation doctrine organised around state acquisition rather than distributive effect; a compensation practice anchored in market value despite the multi-factor standard in section 25(3); a division of constitutional labour under which tenure security and housing are justiciable while ownership remains outside redistribution; and an adjudicative method in which the historical provenance of title, though available as an interpretive consideration and listed among the compensation factors, is an element of no operative test. The study applies doctrinal legal analysis within a socio-legal frame, reading five leading Constitutional Court decisions against transformative constitutionalism and critical legal studies. It finds that entrenchment operates through interpretation and institutional design rather than through constitutional text, which relocates the object of reform: were the barrier textual, amendment would suffice. The article contributes to debates on transformative constitutionalism by specifying, at the level of doctrine, how a redistributive constitutional mandate is neutralised without ever being formally denied.]]>
<![CDATA[Voter Rights and Electoral Justice in Indonesia’s 2024 Concurrent Elections: System Design, Institutional Fragmentation, and Dispute Resolution ]]>
<![CDATA[Sulistyowati]]>;
<![CDATA[Erman I. Rahim]]>;
<![CDATA[Dewi Nadya Maharani]]>;
<![CDATA[Mahda Rahman]]>;
<![CDATA[Gusti Bintang Maharaja]]>
<![CDATA[ International Journal of Constitutional and Administrative Law Vol. 2 No. 2 (2026) ]]>
Publisher : <![CDATA[Gorontalo Legal Research and Consulting ]]>
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DOI: 10.66502/2e11b149
<![CDATA[The 2024 Indonesian general elections were the largest and most administratively complex democratic exercise in the country’s history, combining presidential, national legislative, and regional legislative contests on a single polling day and holding regional executive elections later in the same year. This article examines the causal relationship between the design of the concurrent election system and the protection of voters’ constitutional rights, and evaluates whether Indonesia’s dispute resolution architecture is capable of delivering electoral justice. Using normative-juridical research supported by secondary empirical data, and combining statutory, conceptual, case, and comparative approaches, the article advances two arguments. First, the “five-ballot” concurrent design satisfies the formal dimension of the right to vote while eroding its substantive dimension: it imposes an extreme administrative and physical burden on polling station officials and a cognitive burden on voters, so that high turnout coexists with attenuated deliberative capacity, particularly in legislative contests displaced by presidential coattails. Second, the fragmentation of electoral adjudication among the Constitutional Court, the Election Supervisory Agency, the Honorary Council of Election Organisers, and the State Administrative Court generates divergent standards of proof, inconsistent characterisation of identical conduct, and gaps in remedial authority that are most consequential precisely where structured, systematic, and massive violations are alleged. Analysis of the 2024 election result disputes indicates a discernible movement toward substantive justice, but one constrained by evidentiary thresholds and procedural limits rather than by judicial willingness. The article contributes an integrated account linking concurrency, voter protection, and forum fragmentation, and argues that reconstructing the electoral calendar and unifying electoral jurisdiction are complementary rather than alternative reforms.]]>
<![CDATA[The Constitutional Duty–Administrative Capacity Gap in Forest Governance: Indonesia and Brazil Compared ]]>
<![CDATA[Tri Delvi GM Nggilu]]>;
<![CDATA[Fenty Puluhulawa]]>;
<![CDATA[Apripari]]>
<![CDATA[ International Journal of Constitutional and Administrative Law Vol. 2 No. 2 (2026) ]]>
Publisher : <![CDATA[Gorontalo Legal Research and Consulting ]]>
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DOI: 10.66502/05ybef09
<![CDATA[Environmental constitutionalism obliges states not only to recognise ecological rights and duties but also to equip administrative institutions with the capacity to give them effect. This article examines how constitutional environmental duties are translated into forest governance in Indonesia and Brazil, combining comparative doctrinal analysis with empirical evidence from UPTD KPH Region IV North Gorontalo. In both jurisdictions, constitutional recognition does not by itself secure forest protection, but the two systems manage the resulting gap differently. Indonesia's unitary-decentralised model concentrates broad protective mandates in provincial Forest Management Units while dispersing coercive authority and resources; in North Gorontalo, nine forest-police officers cover approximately 110,811 hectares. Brazil's federal model pairs common environmental competence with statutory cooperation instruments, satellite-based enforcement, and a constitutional jurisprudence that treats the erosion of enforcement capacity as a constitutional concern, although its record also shows that such capacity is reversible. The article conceptualises this mismatch as a constitutional duty–administrative capacity gap, specifies when such a gap becomes a problem of constitutional implementation, and derives three principles: responsibility–capacity correspondence, alignment of authority and accountability, and cooperative environmental administration. Environmental constitutionalism, it concludes, remains institutionally incomplete unless the constitutionalisation of environmental duties is matched by the institutionalisation of administrative capability.]]>
<![CDATA[Blurred Standards of Review: The Silent Convergence of Wednesbury and Proportionality in Indian Administrative Law ]]>
<![CDATA[Arunish Gautam]]>
<![CDATA[ International Journal of Constitutional and Administrative Law Vol. 2 No. 2 (2026) ]]>
Publisher : <![CDATA[Gorontalo Legal Research and Consulting ]]>
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DOI: 10.66502/srkjgz80
<![CDATA[Indian administrative law formally maintains a bifurcated standard of review. Following Om Kumar v. Union of India, proportionality governs administrative action that restricts fundamental freedoms or is challenged as discriminatory under Article 14, while Wednesbury unreasonableness governs action challenged as arbitrary, including the quantum of disciplinary punishment. This article asks whether that bifurcation still describes what Indian courts actually do. Adopting a normative-doctrinal method combining statutory, case, conceptual and comparative approaches, it examines the leading Supreme Court authorities on judicial review of administrative discretion alongside recent constitutional proportionality jurisprudence. It advances four findings. First, the “shockingly disproportionate punishment” standard is not a species of irrationality review but a truncated proportionality inquiry: it compares means with ends, asks implicitly whether a lesser sanction would have sufficed, and weighs the severity of the burden against the gravity of the misconduct. Second, structured proportionality adopted in constitutional adjudication has spilled into the review of executive measures, further destabilising the bifurcation. Third, the resulting indeterminacy is a rule-of-law problem, because the intensity of review comes to depend on how a challenge is pleaded rather than on any reasoned assessment of the right affected or the competence of the decision-maker. Fourth, this pattern is not peculiar to India but recurs across postcolonial and Global South jurisdictions that have received proportionality without articulating the justification for the intensity of scrutiny they apply. The article argues not for abandoning either doctrine but for calibrated review, sustained by judicial duties of characterisation, structure and justification.]]>
