Last month we held the second edition of our weeklong summer seminar on “Constitutionalism in the United States and the World” in collaboration with the Universidad Espíritu Santo, the leading university in Ecuador and one of the best in Latin America. Our group of 50 students was treated to a mix of instruction and excursions. Students visited the LBJ Presidential Library, the Supreme Court of Texas, and the Texas Capitol. 

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Students attended lectures by Paz Avila on “Constitutional Legitimacy in a Land of Constitutional Change,” Justin Dyer on “Constitutional Aspirationalism Revisited,” Zachary Elkins on “How to Achieve Rotation in Power,” Rhonda Evans on “The Difficulties of Decolonizing Constitutional Identities,” Sanford Levinson on “The Problem of Popular Sovereignty,” William J. Magnuson on “Original Discontent: Historical Thought and Constitutional Interpretation,” Morgan Marietta on “The Constitution of Facts,” H. W. Perry Jr on “Agenda-Setting at the Supreme Court of the United States,” and Lucas Powe, Jr. on “America’s Lone Star Constitution.” I gave a lecture on How Constitutions Die. And of course, as with all of our events here in Austin, our guests enjoyed plenty of local Texas BBQ!

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I am grateful to my dear colleagues Pablo Alarcón Peña and Pamela Aguirre Castro for partnering with me to co-host this program. Stay tuned for registration details for the third edition, to be held here at the University of Texas at Austin in May 2026.

The Journal of American Constitutional History has published its Spring 2025 issue. This new issue features excellent papers, including Dictatorship in the American Founding by Adam Lebovitz

If you have not yet met Mokitimi Tšosane, an early-career constitutionalist, I recommend this article about his remarkable journey. He is an inspiration to many in the Kingdom of Lesotho, across the continent of Africa, and farther afield around the world. I count myself among his admirers.

When Harvard paid $27.50 in 1946 for what was thought to be a copy of the Magna Carta, the document was catalogued in the library of the Harvard Law School, freely accessible to researchers. It turns out the document was an original version of Magna Carta, issued in 1300 by King Edward I, the grandson of the King who promulgated it in 1295. The video below tells the incredible story of the two scholars who made this discovery.

Congratulations to Ulrich Haltern on his new book The Constitution of the European Union: A Contextual Analysis (Hart 2025). Europe does not have a single self-contained document that serves as its constitution. Europe instead has a multi-textual constitution consisting of several international treaties of constitutional character, force, and effect. It is an unusual, fascinating, and complex arrangement that is best understood with the help of a learned guide. This book is the best place to start.

I recommend this new paper by Kinfe Yilma, currently Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Leeds: Reimagining Digital Constitutionalism, forthcoming in Global Constitutionalism. 

The preamble to the Constitution of Papua New Guinea is more than 2000 words. (For comparison, the entire Constitution of Iceland is barely 4000 words.) The preamble sets out detailed objectives and obligations for the state and its citizens. In this book titled Implementing Constitutional Goals – Proposals for Papua New Guinea, Justice Vergil Narokobi of the National and Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea recommends how governmental actors may best fulfill their duties under the preamble. 

Congratulations to Jau-Yuan Hwang, formerly a justice on the Constitutional Court of Taiwan, on his appointment as Taiwan's representative to the World Trade Organization. After eight years of service on the Court from 2016 to 2024, he takes up a pivotal post in the only major international organization in which Taiwan holds full membership. Prior to becoming a judge, he was a constitutional law professor at the National Taiwan University.

I enjoyed reading this chapter co-authored by Kálmán Pócza, Márton Csapodi, Gábor Dobos, and Attila Gyulai on Western European Constitutional Courts in Comparative Perspective 1990–2020. The authors identify trends, patterns, and anomalies in the rulings of constitutional courts in Western Europe. How many decisions have their courts issued, how many dissenting opinions were there, what kinds of countervailing powers exist to check the courts? These are just a few of the many questions canvassed in this chapter, which appears in the book Constitutional Review in Western Europe: Judicial-Legislative Relations in Comparative Perspective.

Meet Laura-Stella Enonchong, Senior Lecturer in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. She is also Co-Convenor of Doctoral Studies in the School of Law at SOAS and an Editor of the Journal of African Law. She is interested in Cameroonian constitutional law, comparative constitutional studies, and human rights.  

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I am completing two book chapters. One on Multi-Textuality and Incrementalism in Cameroon’s Democratic Transition for the forthcoming book, Multi-Textual Constitutions of the World (Hart Publishing). The other on The Return of the Coup d’État for the forthcoming Research Handbook on Constitutions and Democracies (Edward Elgar), where I suggest an alternative framework for reimagining coups d’état as a dynamic impulse for reconstructing democratic governance. 

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I plan to explore the architecture of executive power in African constitutional systems through the lens of “presidential sovereignty,” which is deployed as a conceptual tool for understanding the underlying political ethos of constitutional systems. I will draw examples from Angola, Cameroon, and Uganda to analyze the conceptual underpinnings of presidential sovereignty and its manifestation across alternative constitutional traditions.

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My recent article on Constitutional Identity, Bijuralism and the Establishment of the Common Law Division in the Supreme Court of Cameroon offers an original analysis of bijuralism as a constitutional identity in Cameroon. It argues for an unequivocal constitutional affirmation of that identity and for reinforcing the Supreme Court as a sight for the expression of Cameroon’s bijural constitutional identity.

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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!

 

I have read an advanced copy of Let's Agree on Poland, a new book by Maciej Kisilowski and Anna Wojciuk. It is a book for our times. Brilliant, inspiring, and defiant, it sounds a clarion call for a more collaborative, more accommodating, and more hopeful tomorrow in Poland. Hard-hitting and innovative, it recovers Poland's forgotten past, confronts the precarious present, and plants the seeds for patience, accommodation, and respect for all.

Last week I returned to New Haven to mark the 25th anniversary of my graduation from Yale University in May 2000. Hundreds of my classmates attended the three-day program organized by the Association of Yale Alumni. While there, I reconnected with my five roommates from my first year of college in 1996. (The six of us are pictured below.) I also reconnected with the new President of the University, Maurie McInnis, who was formerly Provost here at the University of Texas at Austin. (The two of us are pictured below.) And I made remarks at our Banquet in my capacity as Co-Chair of our Reunion Gift Committee: I announced that our graduating class has raised over $12 million as a gift to Yale in honor of our class reunion. (Pictured below.)