The February law review submission season is here. If you plan to submit a paper, these resources may be useful. 

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1. Here is a database of law reviews that can be searched by subject-matter, jurisdiction, and impact.

2. Here are useful charts containing information about how to submit to individual law reviews as well as special requirements for formatting, expedited review, and withdrawing a submission. 

3. Here is a recent paper with helpful empirical analysis on How to Choose a Law Review. 

4. Google Scholar has published a ranking of law journals based on h5-index and h5-median scores. On that ranking, the top five journals are the Harvard Law Review, the Columbia Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the California Law Review, and the University of Chicago Law Review. 

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Great luck to all who are submitting papers in this submission cycle!

Final round voting is now open for the 2024 Book of the Year! The Prize is awarded by the International Forum on the Future of Constitutionalism. It is given to the most important book in constitutional studies published during the previous calendar year. 
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Congratulations to the Finalists:

 

 

 

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Thank you to the Expert Council for nominating the original 16 finalists for the 2024 Book of the Year prize. 

 

Antonia Baraggia | Italy
Berihun Gebeye | Ethiopia
Masahiko Kinoshita | Japan
Virginie Kuoch | France
Emilio Meyer | Brazil
Jaime Olaiz-González | Mexico
Marieta Safta | Romania

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You are invited to vote here!

My new paper is now available: How Constitutions Die, to be published later this year in the Florida Law Review. I draw from global patterns of constitutional replacement to identify, illustrate, and theorize three models of constitutional life and death: the sundial, the grenade, and the hourglass. Comments are welcome! 

Congratulations to Tania Groppi, Marie-Claire Ponthoreau, and Irene Spigno on the publication of their new book Judicial Bricolage: The Use of Foreign Precedents by Constitutional Judges in the 21st Century, just released by Hart. Spanning 800 pages, over 30 chapters, and nearly 50 contributors, this book describes, analyzes, and evaluates how supreme and constitutional courts around the world use foreign case law.

Meet Oleksandr Marusiak, a doctoral graduate of the Ukrainian Free University currently working for UNESCO while holding a research position at the Institute of State Building and Local Governance (Ukraine). He has shared his expertise in constitutional law and theory with various international and non-governmental organizations, including UNHCR, OSCE, the Council of Europe, NDI, GIZ GmbH, the International Institute of Humanitarian Law, and Centre of Policy and Legal Reforms. 

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Currently, I am writing a chapter for the forthcoming book Multi-Textual Constitutions of the World (Hart Publishing). Last week, I submitted the first draft of my chapter, Exploring Macro-Constitutional Reality in Ukraine: Multi-Textual Insights from the Constitutional Court, for review. I am also awaiting feedback on the first draft of my encyclopedia article, Incorporation of Territory, which I submitted last year to the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Comparative Constitutional Law. The article examines how constitutions outline the acquisition by a state of new territories. 

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My next piece of work in the foreseeable future will be a chapter for a book on Constitutional Unamendability. The tentative title of the chapter is Territorial Integrity as a Protected Value: A Comparative Analysis of Constitutional Clauses on Territorial Inalterability. I am going to examine various jurisdictions to explore how territorial integrity is established as an unamendable constitutional principle. I see this work as a logical continuation of my current encyclopedia entry on the incorporation of territory.

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In 2020, I wrote a short piece for the Forum for Ukrainian Studies entitled Calendar Paradox of Ukrainian Presidents’ Terms in Office: Good Constitution, Bad Mathematics, exploring the intriguing challenge of calculating the presidential term in Ukraine. Despite the 1996 Constitution establishing a fixed five-year term, no Ukrainian president who has completed a full term has ever served precisely five years in office. Given that President Zelenskyy’s five-year term has already expired during martial law in Ukraine (and no elections are possible during the wartime), I believe this text might again spark some interest to the subject.

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Editor's Note: If you would like to nominate someone for a future edition of “Three Questions,” please let me know!

 

Last week, Leigha Crout presented her draft on Multi-Textuality in China: Revisions & Revolutions in our writing intensive graduate Seminar on Comparative Constitutional Law and Politics here at the University of Texas at Austin. My students and I enjoyed learning from her presentation, and later having dinner with her.

Lucas Delgado has published a new book on Human Rights and Corruption in Brazil, appearing in the Hart Series on Constitutionalism in Latin America and the Caribbean. To quote from the publisher's page, “the core focus of the work revolves around human rights and the fight against corruption, shedding light on how democracy evolves or recedes over time under their influence.”

Some law schools struggle to build a robust culture of legal research and writing. A poor research culture leads to minimal amounts of external grants, few faculty publications, low citation scores, and ultimately declining scholarly rankings. Fortunately, two scholars – Steven Wilf and Jeremy Paul – have joined forces to co-author a useful paper that sketches a roadmap for building a better research culture in law schools.

I was invited to speak at the University of Georgia in a conference on Defending Democracy. My remarks were titled America's Amoral Constitution. I argued that the U.S. Constitution is rooted in an amoral code structured around the value of outcome-neutrality. As a result, the Constitution does not evaluate whether a lawful choice is morally right or wrong; it evaluates only whether the choice satisfies the procedures the Constitution requires for it to have been made. This value of outcome-neutrality has implications for constitutional change in the United States: no principle is inviolable, no right is absolute, and no rule is unamendable. This outstanding conference was hosted by the Dean Rusk International Law Center and the Georgia Journal of International & Comparative Law. It was not easy to get to Athens, located just outside of Atlanta. But it is worth the trip. The campus is beautiful!