September 11, 1997

Law professor travels to Madagascar to lead talks on revising the constitution

by Angela Anthony and David Gruning

If you put your finger on a spot on the other side of the globe from Louisiana, you would probably hit Madagascar. The world's fourth largest island (after Greenland, New Guinea, and Borneo) is bigger than France and sits in the Indian Ocean 300 miles east of Africa off Mozambique. This is not where one would expect to find a Loyola faculty member. And yet, because these two places on opposite sides of the world have legal systems with French roots, law Professor David Gruning spent two weeks there in May, at the center of a debate on constitutional reform.

The trip began when Madagascar's President Didier Ratsiraka made an official visit to Washington, D.C., where he mentioned to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that his country's 1992 constitution might undergo a revision and that an American expert could take part in the discussions. The wheels were set in motion to find a French-speaking, American law professor familiar with constitutions drafted in the French legal tradition. The U.S. Information Agency (USIA) contacted Gruning. "I had to prepare quickly, but I considered it an unusual opportunity and something of a challenge," he said.

And what a challenge it turned out to be. "I stepped off the plane and found myself at the center of a national debate," he said. The first question, according to Gruning, was whether Madagascar should adopt a "federalist" constitution. There was a strong consensus that the decentralization called for by the 1992 constitution just hadn't happened and that the same push for decentralization-call it local autonomy or regionalism or federalism-was still very much present and had to be dealt with somehow.

"The more serious problem, though, was that some of the institutions called for by the 1992 constitution hadn't been implemented for a combination of political and practical reasons," Gruning explained. "For example, the national Senate had not yet met because its members had not been elected. They had not been elected because the local authorities which were supposed to do so had not been implemented. Add to this the difficulty of conducting a modern election in a country this size, whose roads and railroads suffer regular cyclone damage and a large portion of whose population is either illiterate or really in the deep country, and you quickly see what they're up against."

According to Gruning, the country's legal culture is steeped in Madagascar traditions. However, when thinking about legal problems, they react with the instincts of a French lawyer to many issues because their legal training and their language is French, he said. Even so, Madagascar's 1992 constitution deliberately borrows from other traditions, Gruning noted, citing the right of an individual litigant to challenge the constitutionality of a statute during his trial. Still, the French notion of the State is an extremely centralized one, consistent with the French view.

"There is a sense of pent-up frustration among business people and a feeling that a lot more local autonomy might foster a market economy quickly," Gruning added. "I sympathize with them. This is a poor country-the annual per capita income ranges from $150 to $700. Yet the country is rich in many ways. In addition to natural and agricultural resources (it is the top exporter of vanilla in the world), it should benefit from the boom in the ecotourism," he clarified.

The day of his departure, Gruning took part in a three-hour panel discussion with 70 officials and politicians who will have crucial roles in any constitutional revision. He admitted, "I was very gratified to hear others using my arguments and reasoning. My efforts seemed to have made a difference."

Gruning said that over the next several months Madagascar officials will continue to meet and discuss implementing changes. A referendum could be presented within a year.

Law Dean John Makdisi noted that Gruning's visit showed "the kind of expertise the law school possesses." Makdisi added because Gruning lectures frequently abroad, including France, this made him a good candidate for the USIA program. In addition, the law school plans, according to Makdisi, to "enhance our resources in international and comparative law generally, with the hope of moving into graduate legal education that will emphasize these areas."