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8 Ind. J. Const. Design 1 (2021)

handle is hein.journals/indjcstd8 and id is 1 raw text is: A Taxonomy on Constitutional Court Appointment Mechanisms in Federal Countries MOLLY MADDEN* INTRODUCTION A federal country is a union of partially self-governing regions, whether those regions are provinces or states, where the regions are unified under a central federal government; there are between twenty-five and thirty-three federal countries in the world.1 The division of power between the regions and the central government is often delineated in a country's constitution and varies from country to country. Countries differ in how they decide federal disputes meaning questions about the country's fundamental federative structure, such as sharing legislative powers, the constitutional amendment procedure, the legal status of the federal and state entities, or the territory of a federated entity and its authority to secede.2 These issues are often decided by Constitutional or Supreme Courts. The amount of state input in the appointment of judges to these courts varies. This paper provides a taxonomy of how federal countries appoint judges to their highest courts. Appointment mechanisms involve (1) little or no meaningful input from state government, (2) the states acting in an indirect role, or (3) substantial state government input. Within-group *Juris Doctor Candidate, 2022, Indiana University Maurer School of Law; Master of Public Affairs Candidate, 2021, Indiana University O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs; Bachelor of Arts, 2018, DePauw University 1 Cheryl Saunders, CONSTITUTIONAL BRIEF: COURTS IN FEDERAL COUNTRIES 1 (Int'l Inst. for Democracy and Electoral Assistance 2019); Note: some countries were excluded from this taxonomy due to a lack of information about their courts. Suriname, for example, has provisions in its constitution for a Constitutional Court in Article 144, but such a court was not established until 2020. See Ivan Cairo, Rule of law only guideline Constitutional Court, May 8, 2020, http://dwtonline.com/laatste-nieuws/2020/05/08/rechtsstatelijkheid-enige-leidraad-constitutioneel-hof; Ivan Cairo, Blunders of the Constitutional Court's Lectures are Being Corrected, Jan. 1, 2020, http://www.dwtonline.con/laatste-nieuws/2020/01 / 19/blunders-voordrachten-constitutioneel-hof-worden- gecorrigeerd. 2 Eugenie Brouillet, The Supreme Court of Canada: The Concept of Cooperative Federalism and Its Effect on the Balance of Power in COURTS IN FEDERAL COUNTRIES: FEDERALISTS OR UNITARISTS? 135 n. 1 (Nicholas Aroney & John Kincaid eds., 2017).

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