What struck me most were the conversations I had with amazing people. At both conferences, I found myself in rooms with people who have devoted their professional lives to public law and its values: judges, scholars, and lawyers who have thought deeply about how power should be held and checked, how rules should be written to narrow the gap between intent and implementation, and how to create a culture of compliance with the law.
***
These two conferences were a genuine gift. A rare chance to gather with people from every corner of the world who ask similar questions and care about similar issues. To everyone who organized these events and made them possible: thank you. Convenings like these help keep the many members of our far-flung global community closely connected to one another.
The Book of the Prize is awarded annually by the International Forum on the Future of Constitutionalism.
Memory Wall for Ran Hirschl
We created this Memory Wall shortly after the passing of our dear friend, Ran Hirschl. Many have since shared remembrances of him. We invite you to read the memories posted by people all around the world. We invite you also to post your own remembrance, too. It will be meaningful for us all. We have arranged for the Memory Wall to be available indefinitely.
My New Paper
I am grateful to Oran Doyle and Mariana Velasco-Rivera for inviting me to contribute a chapter to their forthcoming Elgar Research Handbook on Constitutional Change. My chapter is titled The Hidden Architecture of Constitutions. I explain that every constitution – whether current or historical – may be classified into one of three systems of constitutional reform: monist, dualist, or tripartite. I suggest that these systems open a window into the soul of constitutions by exposing a people's hopes and fears, values and views, and trust (or distrust) for their successors. The full draft is available here.
Animal Rights in Constitutions
Constitutions have historically focused on humans. Increasingly, constitutions are codifying rules about non-humans. From Switzerland's 1973 mandate to protect animals to Belgium's 2024 recognition of animals as sentient beings, a growing number of national charters now carve out space for non-human interests. In her new paper titled The Temporal Dimensions of Animal Constitutionalism, published in Global Constitutionalism, Eva Bernet Kempers asks how time intersects with these provisions.
***
Her answer distinguishes three effects that any given animal rights clause in a constitution carries at once. For one, it ruptures the past, breaking symbolically with a legal tradition that treated animals as mere property. Second, it anchors the present, making existing protections hard to unwind. And, third, it gestures toward the future, laying groundwork for animals as genuine rightsholders. These three dimensions are not competing theories of what animal constitutionalism means; rather, they coexist in the same clause. Rigorous, doctrinally grounded, and genuinely original in its use of time as an analytic lens, this paper shows how constitutional law is expanding beyond the human.
Breaking Up the United States?
Kent Greenfield is a brilliant scholar who combines the highest-level expertise in constitutional and corporate law. His next book – Secession: Why Our Country Should Split Up (And How to Do It Peacefully), coming in January 2027 – argues that America's polarization has become so severe, and its constitutional structure so poorly suited to managing it, that the healthiest path forward is a deliberate, peaceful separation between red and blue states. His thesis sounds at first like like purely a provocation. But he marshals real evidence for the depth of the dysfunction: he highlights polling that shows more Americans believing the country is in a constitutional crisis than in state of democratic health. Yet what distinguishes this book from the usual doom-and-gloom polarization literature is its refusal to stop at diagnosis. Greenfield offers a detailed, step-by-step blueprint for how a peaceful separation might actually work. It is less a thought experiment than an engineering document, drawing on his decades of constitutional theory to grapple seriously with jurisdiction, debt, defense, and citizenship in a way that shows how secession might actually unfold.
***
I do not think secession is the answer for the United States. But whether or not readers find secession the right prescription, Greenfield forces a harder question that most political commentators do not dare to ask: what if the marriage really is over, and pretending otherwise is the more dangerous option? This is a bracing book by a giant scholar unafraid to follow an uncomfortable argument to its logical end. It sharpens our own thinking about what, exactly, if anything, is broken in American governance and what the actual alternatives are.
South Korean Courts and Minority Rights
When elected branches in a democracy refuse to act, what happens to the minorities left waiting? In her new paper The Rights of Gender and Sexual Minorities in South Korea: The Empowering Role of the Judiciary, published in the Asian Journal of Comparative Law, Yoon Jin Shin answers that question with a granular, case-by-case account of South Korea, where the National Assembly has never passed a single law protecting LGBTIQ+ rights, and where organized religious opposition has stalled anti-discrimination bills for nearly two decades – even one backed by over 100,000 citizen signatures. The author shows how the judiciary has quietly stepped into that vacuum.
***
She traces the work of South Korean courts across four fronts: the slow loosening of surgery-and-sterilization requirements for transgender gender-marker correction, the Supreme Court's narrowing of a colonial-era military sodomy law, a landmark 2024 ruling recognizing same-sex partners as health-insurance dependents, and repeated judicial resistance to local governments that tried to block pride festivals through pretextual permit denials. In each area, the throughline is the same: courts moving cautiously but genuinely forward, while legislators and bureaucrats stay put or actively obstruct.
***
What makes the piece more than a case digest is the paper's careful attention to how these victories actually happened: lower courts building pressure the Supreme Court eventually could not ignore, and justices repeatedly insisting they were not overstepping. This is a well-documented account of courts filling a democratic vacuum – and a story about how minority rights find protection when majorities will not safeguard them.
Article 2 TEU
In his excellent blog post at I·CONnect,Fruela Río Santos examines Commission v Hungary (Case C‑769/22), a ruling issued in April 2026. He argues that the ruling is quietly one of the most consequential EU decisions years. The Hungarian statute under scrutiny in this ruling implemented a ban on any content promoting homosexuality or non-cisgender identities across advertising, broadcasting, online services, and schools, all under the guise of child protection. The Court struck down the ban on several grounds, including the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union and the General Data Protection Regulation. But, as Río Santos explains, the judgment's true significance lies not in the fall of the Hungarian law but in the transformation of Article 2 of the Treaty on European Union.
***
Article 2 establishes the core constitutional foundation of the EU. It declares that the Union is built upon the indivisible, universal values of human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and respect for human rights, including the rights of minorities. In Commission v Hungary, the Court elevated Article 2 from a declaration of principles into an enforceable standard, giving the Union, for the very first time, a genuine judicial check on violations that threaten to erode the pillars of democracy.
Teaching AI and the Law at Berkeley
The University of California at Berkeley is recruiting a Professor of Law to teach and research in the area of AI, Inequality, and Society. As the University explains, “this role would be a part of a campus initiative that brings together the Computer Science division of the EECS department, the departments of Sociology and Statistics, and the schools of Information and Law to address questions related to the myriad ways in which Artificial Intelligence may reshape society and individual lives, possibly exacerbating or narrowing existing inequalities and creating new ones while changing opportunity structures and participation by individuals and groups in society. Areas of interest for the AIIS initiative cut across disciplinary boundaries and include, but are not limited to: (i) employment, (ii) algorithmic accountability and systemic fairness, (iii) data governance and civil liberties, and (iv) data, information, and markets.” The full Call for Applications is available here. The closing date is September 4, 2026.
Democracy, for Today and Tomorrow
Every democracy faces a temporal bind: it answers only to the people currently alive, yet its decisions – on debt, infrastructure, and especially climate – bind generations who have no vote and no voice. Scholars have typically patched this gap by reaching outside democratic theory entirely, invoking human rights or intergenerational equity to justify obligations to the unborn. Doreen Lustig rejects that patch in her new paper What Democracy Owes the Future, just published in the International Journal of Constitutional Law. Her argument is that democracy does not need borrowed justification to protect the future. She argues that the obligation is already built into what self-governance means, since genuine self-rule requires that the present always retain the capacity to revisit its own choices.
*** Lustig introduces the concept of “democratic foreclosure,” a label for decisions so durable and so costly to unwind that they quietly strip the citizens of today and those of tomorrow of any real chance to decide differently. Climate policy is the obvious test case, and Lustig uses it well. She shows how today's emissions choices do not merely affect future people; they foreclose the future's own capacity for self-government.
***
What is most persuasive is the modesty of her conclusion: no generation can guarantee the future, but every democratic generation owes it the responsibility of keeping options open. This is a smaller claim than we find in the literature on intergenerational justice. Yet precisely because the claim is more narrow, it is more defensible. This is an original work of democratic theory, with real bite for how we think about the promise of democracy for both today and tomorrow.
Constitutionalism in Asia Pacific
The new book Pathways to Constitutional Legitimacy in Asia Pacific – edited by Bryan Dennis G. Tiojanco, Jaclyn Neo, Benjamin Lawrence, and Kentaro Matsubara – puts Bruce Ackerman's influential book on Revolutionary Constitutions to the test across Asia Pacific. Rather than simply applying Ackerman's framework, the book interrogates its reach: can his tripartite framework of constitutional legitimation illuminate constitutional developments in India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, Singapore, Republican China, Thailand, and Japan?
***
This is a rich, rigorously argued collection that will reward scholars of comparative constitutional law, political theory, and Asian politics alike. Its great strength is that it does not treat Ackerman's framework as gospel or as a target for easy dismissal. Rather, contributors push, extend, and sometimes reject his categories, generating genuinely new insight in the process. The closing chapter features Ackerman's own Afterword in which he wrestles openly with the critiques leveled at his theory. This makes the book feel like a live scholarly conversation rather than a settled verdict. The best part of it all is that the book is freely available open access.
IACL World Congress of Constitutional Law
The quadrennial World Congress of Constitutional Law was a truly spectacular event. I saw old friends, made new ones, and left feeling inspired by the people and ideas I encountered over the course of this weeklong program. The Congress was hosted at Externado University in Colombia, where I am proud to be a long-time visiting professor.
*** I was delighted to participate in two programs:
1. A panel titled Guardians of the Constitution, featuring four judges engaged in a global judicial dialogue: Sonia Díaz Inoa, Justice of the Constitutional Tribunal of the Dominican Republic; Catalina Lagos, Justice of the Constitutional Court of Chile; Paola Andrea Meneses Mosquera, President of the Constitutional Court of Colombia, and Elena Simina Tănăsescu, President of the Constitutional Court of Romania.
2. A workshop on Constitution-Making and Constitutional Reform: Amendment, Dismemberment, and Replacement, which I co-hosted with Luisa Fernanda García-López and Gonzalo Andrés Ramírez Cleves.
***
A special thank you to Hernando Parra Nieto, President of Externado University; Magdalena Inés Correa Henao and Paula Robledo Silva, Co-Chairs of the Organizing Committee; Gonzalo Andrés Ramírez Cleves, Andrés Mauricio Gutiérrez Beltrán, Wendy Milena Diaz Uribe, and the entire team at Externado; as well as the leaders and Secretariat of the International Association of Constitutional Law.
The Law of Multiculturalism in Canada
A new book by Vrinda Narain, just published by the University of Toronto Press: Towards a Critical Multiculturalism: Inclusive Equality and the Accommodation of Difference. Narrain offers a rigorous (and overdue) interrogation of Canada's signature policy export: state multiculturalism, and its operative principle of “reasonable accommodation.” Narain argues that the law and policy of multiculturalism in Canada, however well-intentioned in their origins, have drifted from celebrating difference toward managing it. The result, she argues, has been to quietly recenter majority-culture norms as the baseline against which minority practices must be judged reasonable, tolerable, or assimilable. Drawing on feminist constitutionalism, intersectionality, and critical race theory, Narain traces how multiculturalism policy in Canada places the heaviest burden on those situated at the intersection of multiple minority statuses. Through close readings of landmark cases, Narain argues that doctrines of neutrality can themselves become instruments of structural inequality. This book should unsettle anyone who takes the self-congratulatory reputation of Canadian multiculturalism at face value.
Undecided Voters in Elections and Referendums
How do undecided voters ultimately cast their ballot? And do they vote differently in elections versus referendums? In their new paper Electoral Context Matters: Why Undecided Voters in Elections and Referendums are Different, published in Parliamentary Affairs, Sarah Cameron and Ian McAllister make two important findings. First, late deciders break heavily in referendums toward “no,” consistent with a risk-aversion account: a referendum offers an irreversible constitutional change, and the uninformed default to the status quo. Second, in general elections, by contrast, late deciders disproportionately abandon the major parties for minor parties and independents, a far lower-risk act given preferential voting and the reversibility of any government at the next poll. This paper is an excellent electoral analysis with real stakes for practice.
Three Questions with Eman Rashwan
Meet Eman Rashwan, a Lecturer in Public Law at Cairo University. Her research and expertise focus on constitutional law in crisis, civil rights and liberties, the interplay between constitutional law and transitional justice, and the economic analysis of public law. Learn more about her research here.
***
What are your currently writing?
I am currently working on multiple research projects. The closest one for submission explains how constitutional reforms fail as a guarantee of non-repetition in the realm of transitional justice through both constitutional legality and revolutionary legitimacy claims, and how this theory of fragile constitutional guarantees was applied in the Tunisian case after 2010.
***
What are your currently writing?
I don’t consider myself particularly influenced by a distinct school of legal thought. However, reading the work of James M. Buchanan and Robert Cooter in particular was extremely transformative for the way I think about public institutions. An earlier theorist who shaped the very foundation of my viewing of state, power, and the ethics of government is Ali Ibn Abu Taleb.
***
Which one of your publications (just one!) do you recommend we read to learn more about you and your work?
*** I was delighted to participate in four programs: 1. A panel on Comparative Constitutional Reform in Latin America, featuring Jeronimo Lau Alberdi, Milton Cesar Jimenez Ramirez, Pablo Alarcon and Pamela Juliana Aguirre Castro, Jaime Olaiz-Gonzalez and Jose Mario de la Garza-Martins, and Juliano Zaiden Benvindo and Manuellita Hermes.
2. A panel on Informal Constitutional Change by Desuetude, featuring Patricia Popelier, Mele Tupou Vaitohi, Andrea Katz, and Gert Jan Geertjes.
3. A panel on the Design and Politics of Constitutional Amendment, featuring Joel Colón-Ríos, Oran Doyle, Elisabeth Perham, Yaniv Roznai, Amal Sethi, and Mariana Velasco-Rivera.
4. A panel on Publishing Books in Public Law, featuring Lauren Danahy, Maartje De Visser, Rosalind Dixon, Robert Schütze, and Amal Sethi. ***
A special thank you to Michaela Hailbronner and Sergio Verdugo, Co-Presidents of ICON-S; Erin Delaney, Secretary General; Evan Rosevear and Amal Sethi, Deputy Secretaries General; and the entire team at ICON-S, including the Executive Committee and all standing committee members.
***
And a big thank you to Eoin Carolan and the entire team at University College Dublin for welcoming us all so warmly to campus. Next year we will gather in Taiwan! Please plan to join us!
Interpreting the U.S. Constitution
Coming soon in August: The Constitution of Practice: On Law and Tradition by Marc DeGirolami. This new book offers a profoundly important framework for understanding American constitutional law through the lens of enduring cultural, political, and legal traditions. In a challenge to both originalists and living constitutionalists, DeGirolami argues that constitutional traditions are vital mechanisms that manifest and transmit political excellence across generations – and that bind citizens together, fostering the civic affection necessary to sustain a democratic republic. A major objective of the book is to balance innovation with tradition in order to rebuild trust in legal institutions. I recommend it enthusiastically.
Teaching Comparative Law at SMU
Singapore Management University has opened its recruitment of scholars at all ranks – tenure-track Assistant, Associate, and Full Professors – across many scholarly disciplines in law, including Comparative Legal Systems and Comparative Asian Law, with a particular focus on Chinese or Indonesian Law. The application deadline is September 25, 2026. The full Call for Applications is available here.
Interpreting Human Rights
A new book by Trésor Muhindo Makunya asks an important question: why do courts applying similar interpretive methods – textual, contextual, teleological, for instance – arrive at such different outcomes in human rights cases? Between Legal Tradition and Transformation: Constitutional Interpretation of Fundamental Rights by the Constitutional Courts of Benin, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa offers an answer derived from comparing across, rather than within, legal traditions. Makunya places civil law Benin and the Democratic Republic of Congo alongside common law South Africa. In doing so, he escapes what he calls “monological” comparison (the tendency to study French-tradition courts only against each other, or common-law courts only against their own family) and instead builds a genuinely dialogical account of how history, politics, and institutional design shape rights adjudication.
***
Organized around three well-chosen rights categories – equality and non-discrimination, fair trial, and political rights – this book moves from rich doctrinal case analysis to a normative argument culminating in a prescription. He observes that African constitutional courts, and the human rights culture they anchor, would be strengthened by closer synergy between civil and common law traditions rather than continued isolation within them.
Constitutional Supremacy in Brazil
In his 2022 book titled Supremacia da Constituição e Controle de Constitucionalidade no Brasil, public prosecutor and university professor Luiz Fernando Calil de Freitas dives deeply into the nature of constitutional authority in Brazil. He asks how a constitutional order gives practical force to the supremacy of its Constitution. His book unfolds in two main movements. First, he reconstructs the history of Brazilian constitutionalism, identifying the political and legal episodes that shaped each of Brazil’s constitutions and the institutional conditions under which constitutional supremacy became meaningful. Second, he develops a theory of the Constitution grounded in Luigi Ferrajoli’s theory of law and democracy, using that framework to build an account of constitutional review suited to Brazil’s current constitutional model. The main strength of the book is how tightly it connects doctrinal analysis, constitutional history, and democratic theory to show that judicial review is not merely a technical device for invalidating laws, but a constitutional practice that furthers democratic legitimacy in Brazil. Supremacia da Constituição e Controle de Constitucionalidade no Brasil is a careful reconstruction of the constitutional traditions of Brazil and a compelling theory of judicial review rooted in the normative ambitions and institutional complexities of the Constitution of 1988.
Congratulations to Anamaría Quintana-Cepeda
Meet the newest Doctor of Law, Anamaría Quintana-Cepeda. Last week, she successfully defended her doctoral thesis on La protección a los deudores de obligaciones dinerarias en situaciones de crisis: un análisis a partir del derecho colombian at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. While her thesis deals primarily with the law of contract, it intersects in a novel way with the theory of fundamental rights and the social rule of law. She advances the innovative and urgent claim that contracts can be a mechanism for protecting and promoting human dignity. Fascinating! ***
Dr. Quintana-Cepeda's thesis supervisor was Juan Luis Goldenberg. The doctoral panel consisted of Marcelo Barrientos, Mariana Bernal, Patricia López, Álvaro Mendoza, and Esteban Pereira. Congratulations!
Plural Executives in Constitutional Design
A new paper by Stephen Gardbaum is now available in advance open access at the International Journal of Constitutional Law. Titled The Case for Plural Executives in the Age of Strongmen, the paper article makes a compelling case for reviving one of constitutionalism's oldest and most neglected institutional forms: the plural executive. The paper begins with a useful distinction between two related but separable phenomena: the general rise of executive dominance over legislatures, and what Gardbaum describes as “chief executive aggrandizement,” meaning the concentration of power within the executive in a single head of government. It is the combination of these two trends, he argues, that has produced the conditions under which contemporary “strongman” leaders have been able to erode democratic institutions from within.
***
Rather than treating single and plural executives as a historical binary, Gardbaum reframes them as a spectrum, and offers a careful taxonomy of the forms full plurality can take, for instance collegial councils, unbundled subject-matter executives, and various combinations drawn from cases as varied as the Swiss Federal Council, Bosnia and Herzegovina's tripartite presidency, and the partially unbundled state executives of the American states.
*** The result is a rigorous, wide-ranging, and timely piece of comparative constitutional design that treats the plural executive as a genuine institutional option rather than a historical curiosity.
This year I am on a mission to exercise every day of the year. (I missed three days last year.) I have been posting a daily photo of my exercise routine on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X/Twitter. Public accountability keeps me striving for my goal.
***
Please let me know if you, too, will take the challenge!
Was this email forwarded to you by someone else?
Click here to sign-up to receive it directly from me.
The mission of the International Forum on the Future of Constitutionalism is to marshal knowledge and experience to build a world of opportunity, liberty, and dignity for all.
727 East Dean Keeton Street Austin, TX 78705, United States
