This article examines the contribution to transnational constitution-making of the European Commission for Democracy through Law, better known as the Venice Commission. While part of the Council of Europe, the Venice Commission is much less understood than the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), notwithstanding the existing literature.1 This chapter therefore seeks to explicate and evaluate. It begins by explicating the organizational foundations of the Venice Commission, followed by analysis of its remit and role. The focus then shifts to triggering and working methodology.
The remainder of the article is concerned with evaluation of the Commission’s role in relation to constitution-making as broadly conceived, the analysis being situated within the literature concerning transnational legal orders (TLOs).2 There is an overview of the central elements of TLO theory, the reasons why the Venice Commission can be conceptualized within this theoretical frame, and its distinctive contribution to constitution-making. TLOs are increasingly prevalent across diverse fields, including those concerned with constitutions, democracy, human rights and the rule of law. The prevalence of TLOs renders it all the more important that they are subject to the same searching evaluation that we commonly bring to bear when analyzing national norms. To this end there is more detailed analysis of the process rights and procedure afforded to the state that is the subject of a Venice Commission opinion, and the substantive criteria and standards that the Commission considers when producing its opinions. The article concludes with discussion of implementation by the addressee of the opinion, and the broader impact of the Commission through sharing best practice and cooperation.

Population growth, continuing suburbanization, and higher labor-force-participation rates, combined with a virtual halt in new freeway construction, have led to rapid increases in traffic congestion in the U.S. This congestion is costly, for example, the cost of highway congestion in the Lose Angeles region is estimated to be $3.6 billion per year. Roughly half of this congestion is estimated to be caused by incidents, and 63% is on freeways. In the future, planners project that congestion will increase dramatically and that the proportion of delay on surface streets will increase, as congestion spreads. Automated freeways have been proposed as a solution to urban traffic congestion. Paper describes the staged development of automated urban freeways and then suggests a series of research topics related to the major policy issues of road capacity, air quality, noise, safety and liability, cost and equity, privacy, and organizational complexity. These difficult questions should be resolved before public acceptance for the technology is sought. Policy research on these matters should be carried out before or at the same time as the technology is being developed.

It is unlikely that roadway construction or vehicle automation will be able to alleviate most major urban congestion in the near future (5-15 years). What else can be done to reasonably reduce congestion? Several approaches to reducing congestion by capacity allocation are reviewed: laissez-faire allocation, allocation by passenger load, ramp metering, road and parking pricing, allocation by trip purpose, rationing, and mixed strategies. These approaches are qualitatively compared against four criteria: effectiveness at reducing congestion, economic efficiency, income distribution effects, and flexibility of access for urgent trips. Recommendations are made regarding capacity-allocation measures with potential to reduce congestion and to increase economic efficiency. The equity impacts of these measures are identified and methods for mitigating these effects are proposed. Congestion pricing, together with free but metered on-ramps at freeways for nonpayers or with subsidies for lower-income households at1 are found to deserve further study and an incremental method of adoption is outlined.