Registration is now open for the next Global Summit on Constitutionalism, to be held on March 17-19, 2027, here at the University of Texas at Austin. The Call for Papers and Panels is now available here. Submissions are accepted until September 14, 2026. All are welcome!
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The Global Summit is an international conference showcasing all areas of constitutionalism. The program features plenary lectures and moderated discussions as well as concurrent panels held over the course of three days. The first edition was held in 2021, the second in 2023, and the third in 2025. The 2027 Global Summit will be the fourth edition. We are grateful to our generous sponsors for supporting this international conference.
10. International Forum on the Future of Constitutionalism
*** All are welcome to submit proposals for fully-formed panels or individual paper presentations – scholars, jurists, practitioners, activists, and students of all ranks around the world. Observers are welcome but must register their attendance.
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The overriding purpose of the Global Summit is to create opportunities for all to flourish in an intellectually stimulating environment committed to scholarly excellence, academic integrity, cultural competence, freedom of speech, and global engagement. In addition to the rich menu of scholarly programming, the Global Summit offers the opportunity to engage in rewarding and collaborative intellectual exchange, and to enjoy occasions for social interaction.
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The Global Summit is hosted by the Constitutional Studies Program at the University of Texas at Austin, and presented in collaboration with the International Forum on the Future of Constitutionalism. We look forward to seeing many of you here in Austin next March!
Richard Albert
Your Help with a Survey, Please
I am conducting a survey on constitutional conventions, also known as constituent assemblies. The survey contains roughly 30 questions that can be answered with “Strongly Agree,” “Agree,” “Disagree,” or “Strongly Disagree.”
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Could you please help me by completing the survey here before Monday, August 24? Your identity will remain concealed, even from me. Thank you very much for considering this!
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Analyzing Constitutional Rejection in Chile
Chile is now the world's most instructive laboratory for constitution-making failure: two processes, two draft constitutions, opposite in design and ideology, both rejected in referendums, first in 2022 then in 2023.
*** The Commission's achievement is the puzzle she sets out to explain. Twenty-four members – evenly split into left and right blocs, negotiating under a three-fifths threshold – produced a draft authored by representatives across the political spectrum. Remarkably, this cross-partisan commitment remained strong even after the Council elections handed the right the numbers to dispense with the left entirely. Undurraga identifies four conditions that helped sustain cross-partisanship: balanced power, twelve mandatory pre-agreed principles, commissioners whom parties trusted and who had negotiated before, and a culture of cooperation — including a mutual pledge of restraint in the press on election night.
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Then, she argues, the elected Council took over, none of those conditions survived, and the text became a campaign platform. Undurraga's closing sections on the referendum are the most quietly alarming. She observes that constitutional language is inherently open-textured, that deliberate ambiguity is often what makes agreement possible, and that an adversarial campaign in a digital information environment destroys precisely the shared sense of purpose that made the ambiguity safe. Her analysis is candid and critical. And it should be read by constitution-makers all around the world.
Model Constitutional Convention
The Model Constitutional Convention is one of the most innovative and important programs created for students interested in law and government. Students play the role of delegates in a constitutional convention. They design, negotiate, and debate proposals to amend the U.S. Constitution. It is a remarkable event consisting of over 100 students – two representing each of the 50 states as well as students representing the territories. Students come to the convention having prepared intensely for this experience by studying the Constitution, reading case law and scholarship, and drafting amendment proposals. At the convention, they practice skills they will use in law and life, including civil discourse and compromise. This is an extraordinary event unlike any other. It is the most rewarding academic activity I have had the pleasure and privilege of attending.
A recent public opinion poll reveals that popular opinion on the U.S. Supreme Court has fallen to a record low of 33 percent. The lowest approval rating prior to this was 39 percent, recorded just last year. As recently as August 2009, 61 percent of Americans approved of the Court.
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One could predict that Democratic voters would disapprove of this particular Court as it is presently composed. And, indeed, only 12 percent of Democrats approve. But the surprising revelation in the poll is that only 58 percent of Republican voters approve of the current Court, down from a high of 80 percent approval in January 2001.
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No one wins when the highest court in the land does not enjoy the trust of the people.
Plurinational Constitutionalism
In their forthcoming book Indigenous Justice in Bolivia and the Limits of Plurinational Constitutionalism – to be published by Hart in January 2027 – René Provost and Rhona Goodarzi introduce readers to one of the boldest experiments in recent constitutional design: Bolivia's 2009 Constitution, which declares Indigenous and ordinary jurisdictions hierarchically equal. Their book is combines the best of doctrinal analysis and ethnographic observation. The authors situate the Bolivian Constitution within the third wave of Latin American pluralist constitution-making. Their verdict on Bolivia is measured rather than triumphal or damning. In their view, the Bolivian Constitution represents a promise partially unfulfilled. The argue that it was derailed by statutory deconstitutionalisation, judicial weakness, and unreformed legal culture, with legal education emerging as the decisive site of repair. This is a book worth reading by anyone interested in legal pluralism.
Class Visitors this Semester
This coming semester – starting next week! – I will once again teach my advanced course on Constitutional Amendments in the United States and the World here at the University of Texas at Austin.
*** This course focuses on the design, history, practice, and theory of constitutional amendment in the United States. We explore key questions in constitutional reform, including: (1) What does the U.S. Constitution require for a constitutional amendment?; (2) Are there limitations on what may be amended into or out of the US Constitution?; (3) What is (or should be) the role of courts in constitutional amendment?; (4) What values are reflected in the architecture of the country's constitutional amendment procedures?; and (5) Why doesn’t the U.S. Constitution make anything unamendable, in contrast to many other countries in the world which protect human dignity, civil rights, and fundamental freedoms against amendment?
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My students will be treated to lectures by eight outstanding experts in constitution-making and constitutional reform. My sincere thanks to each of these visitors for sharing their time and insights with us:
This is the time of year when prospective professors apply for tenure-track teaching positions through the Association of American Law Schools. A new publication titled Field Notes from the U.S. Law Teaching Market is an excellent guide for applicants. It is written by someone who recently went through the process, and it is assembled with input from others who have navigated it, too.
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The document walks applicants through the entire entry-level hiring cycle, beginning with a month-by-month timeline: fellowship applications and AALS registration in summer, screening interviews in the fall conference season, and callbacks and offers through winter and spring. Along the way, the publication covers the practical machinery of a candidacy, namely building a CV and research agenda, drafting and placing law review articles, choosing references, cultivating mentors, preparing the job talk, and handling the negotiation and salary questions that arrive at the end.
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A distinguishing feature of this resource is its attention to internationally trained candidates. It maps the standard pipeline for non-U.S. first-degree holders, and backs it with data drawn from recent hiring years. It highlights which schools grant the degrees that lead to placements, which institutions feed the market most heavily, how many hires come through fellowships, and how long the typical path from first degree to hire actually takes.
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The final sections are reference materials: extensive tables of fellowships and other programs by school, with stipends, teaching loads, and durations, plus lists of law review submission resources and interview question banks. This publication is extraordinarily useful for anyone weighing an academic career in law here in the United States.
Some constitutional amendments are not really amendments at all. They are transformative constitutional reforms that reject the essential characteristics of the constitution and destroy its foundations. These constitutional changes demolish the basic structure of the constitution while at the same time building a new foundation rooted in principles contrary to the old. We call them constitutional dismemberments.
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Latin America has been particularly susceptible to constitutional dismemberments. This book draws from law, history, and politics both to demonstrate that Latin American constitutions have been the target of constitutional dismemberment and to explain the social and political forces behind these transformative reforms as well as their consequences.
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The outstanding contributors to this volume apply the concept of constitutional dismemberment systematically across the region, drawing from the rich history of constitutional activity in some of the world’s most fascinating jurisdictions for the study of constitutional change: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. The jurisdictions chosen are among the ones in the region whose constitutions have been most reformed by both proper and improper means. In addition, many of these jurisdictions have been largely neglected in the English language literature on constitutional change. This collection seeks therefore both to remedy this deficiency and, as a consequence, to encourage others to account for them and other little-known constitutions as comparators in their own comparative studies. We believe that Comparative Constitutional Reform in Latin America will be an valuable resource for researchers, academics, and policymakers in the areas of Constitutional Law and Politics, Legal Theory, and Public Law.
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It has been a great joy to work with such an amazing team of colleagues from all around the region:
+ Pamela Juliana Aguirre Castro
+ Pablo Andrés Alarcón Peña
+ Jeronimo Lau Alberdi
+ Juliano Zaiden Benvindo
+ Heber Joel Campos
+ Julio Antonio Fernández Estrada
+ Michel Fernández Pérez
+ José Mario de la Garza-Martins
+ Manuellita Hermes
+ José Ignacio Hernández
+ Milton César Jiménez Ramírez
+ Manuel Adrián Merino Menjívar
+ Jaime Olaiz-González
+ Alejandra Ovalle-Valdés
+ Daniela Urosa
+ Marcos Antonio Vela Ávalos
+ Cristián Villalonga
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This first book is part of a long-term inquiry into constitutional reform in Latin America. We aspire to cover each and every country in the region. Please let me know if there are interesting examples of constitutional dismemberment in your jurisdiction. I would be very interested to learn about them!
I created the Mark Tushnet Prize in Comparative Law in 2019 when I served as Chair of the Section on Comparative Law in the AALS. The Tushnet Prize is awarded annually to an untenured scholar at an AALS Member School in any subject of comparative law.
What does trust have to do with amending a constitution? According to this new book by William Blake, Joseph Cozza, and Dave Armstrong, the answer is a lot. According to them, the degree of trust in a society may perhaps matter more than the rules of constitutional amendment themselves. In their new book on The Social Foundations of Constitutional Innovation, this outstanding trio take aim at a long-standing assumption in the literature on constitutional amendment: that a given society's capacity to navigate constitutional change is fixed. They argue instead that a society's capacity to amend its constitution varies with civic connectedness. Drawing and building on earlier studies showing that social capital lowers the transaction costs of collective action, they explain why some societies amend their constitution frequently while others, even with comparable rules, barely amend at all.
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There are many strengths to this book. One is the mixed-methods approach they take to test their thesis. The authors build cross-national statistical models, then track social capital and amendment activity longitudinally within individual countries over time, then run a survey experiment on the U.S. Equal Rights Amendment and public attitudes toward constitutional hardball, and finally close with a detailed case study of Ireland's 2018 abortion referendum. This range of methods, sustained across a single short volume, is unusual and exceptionally well executed.
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What is the payoff of the book? A genuinely new way to think about constitutional change. The authors show that overcoming constitutional rigidity is not simply (or even) a problem of institutional design that is solvable by tweaking supermajority thresholds. They explain that the key to assuaging constitutional rigidity is whether a society has enough civic trust to make good use of the amendment procedures it already has, whether or not those procedures appear on paper to be difficult to use.
Written for scholars of comparative constitutionalism, this new resource contains seven chapters that focus on the most significant parts of the current Colombian Constitution: the doctrine of fundamental rights and the acción de tutela; the rights of indigenous peoples; women's rights and gender equality; the design of the legislative and judicial branches; the Colombian presidential system and its mechanisms of control; and transitional constitutionalism as it emerged from the peace process. I recommend this book for anyone interested in learning about one of the most important modern constitutions in the world.
A Looming Constitutional Crisis in Canada?
In December 2022, the Canadian province of Quebec purported unilaterally to amend the text of the Constitution of Canada by inserting a new provision to exempt members of its National Assembly from swearing allegiance to the King. In their new paper L’abolition unilatérale du serment au roi par le Québec est-elle constitutionnelle ?, published in the McGill Law Journal, Yan Campagnolo and Camille Bontems argue meticulously why Quebec's effort to amend the Constitution of Canada is constitutionally problematic on independent grounds of form and substance.
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As to form, they interpret section 45 of the Constitution Act, 1982, as authorizing a province amend its own provincial constitution, not the national constitutional text itself. As a result, they argue, an alteration of the text of the Constitution of Canada exceeds the authority conferred by section 45. As to substance, they argue compellingly that the office, status, and symbolic role of the Crown across the federation requires any effort to abolish the oath to comply with the unanimity procedure of section 41(a), the highest bar in Canadian constitutional amendment.
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This piece is an excellent doctrinal analysis of Canadian constitutional amendment. But it is more than that. It is a clear-eyed account of the stakes involved: with only seven unsworn members today, an eventual court challenge would have modest consequences, but if a majority of Quebec's National Assembly refuses the oath after the 2026 election, the same challenge could retroactively invalidate every single law that legislature passes. And this could give rise to a genuine constitutional crisis.
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Rigorously argued, refreshingly non-partisan, and quietly alarming, this paper is recommended reading for anyone following Canadian federalism, the afterlife of the monarchy in Canada, and the machinery of constitutional amendment under real political pressure.
AI in the Legal Profession
The Second Global Report on the State of Artificial Intelligence in Legal Practice is now published and available. This book gathers data on how law firms and legal departments around the world use AI. How and where do lawyers actually use AI? Which tools dominate the market, and why? What are the biggest opportunities, risks and concerns? How will AI shape the future of legal professions and education? This is the best guide available today to understand how AI is changing the legal profession.
Courts and Secession
Are judges neutral in secession cases? Vito Breda asks that question in his new paper Secession Referenda and the Perception of Judicial Objectivity in Britain, Italy and Spain. Working exclusively from public records – including expense claims, biographical disclosures, parliamentary documents – he builds a case that all three of the landmark secession rulings in Europe featured judges whose personal circumstances or relational histories would, under the courts' own recusal doctrines, invite reasonable questions about the appearance of bias. Breda is careful to insist that he is not alleging actual bias. His essay is instead about optics and institutional trust, not judicial misconduct. In our present era when courts are increasingly asked to referee existential constitutional questions, this is a sharp, well sourced, and genuinely important intervention. It is valuable reading to understand how courts sustain legitimacy when judges confront questions about the state itself.
Sovereignty in Law and Politics
Few concepts in legal theory are as foundational and as stubbornly contested as sovereignty. A newly published ambitious volume – the Research Handbook on the Law and Politics of Sovereignty, edited by Marinos Diamantides, Michel Rosenfeld, and Giuseppe Martinico – treats that contestation as a feature rather than a bug. Across 25 chapters and five thematic parts, the editors trace what they aptly call the “epigenesis” of sovereignty, a reference to its messy, context-dependent accumulation of reinterpretations, from classical Athens and imperial Rome through Byzantium, the Westphalian settlement, and into the fractured present of EU law, transnational governance, and resurgent populism.
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What sets this volume apart from the usual Euro-American canon is its genuine commitment to sovereignty's relational history. Chapters examine the concept through Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Confucian, and Indigenous traditions, alongside sharp critical interventions – feminist, postcolonial, anarchist – that ask whether sovereignty is worth salvaging at all, or whether it is better off being retired once and for all.
*** This book is less a reference work to be consulted piecemeal than an argument in itself: that the persistence of sovereignty as a concept, despite decades of scholars declaring it obsolete, deserves serious and multidisciplinary reckoning rather than either uncritical defense or dismissal. This is wide-ranging resource for anyone thinking seriously the nature of authority.
A Special Visit to Japan
I traveled to Japan last month at the invitation to Masahiko Kinoshita, Professor of Constitutional at Kobe University. My visit took me to Kobe, Osaka, and Tokyo. I gave presentations at Kobe University on The Power of Judicial Nullification in Asia and the World, focusing on how Asian courts have reviewed and sometimes invalidated constitutional amendments; at Keio University on “Artificial Intelligence in Constitution-Making,” drawing from my forthcoming paper titled Should AI Write Your Constitution?; and at the University of Tokyo, where I delivered the Suenobu Foundation Endowed Lecture in Transnational Law on “Amending Constitutions,” an effort to explain how constitutions around the world change – and how they should.
*** During my visit, I enjoyed delicious food, saw many lovely sites, and made several new friends in the academy. It was a special trip that I will forever cherish. And I took many photos!
*** I am grateful to everyone who made the trip possible with their generosity, kindness, and participation as speakers or discussants in the scholarly activities organized during my stay, including Akiko Ejima, Yasuo Hasebe, Kayoko Ishihara, Miki Kadota, Masahiko Kinoshita, Keigo Komamura, Emi Masuta, Kentaro Matsubara, Tokujin Matsudaira, Nami Thea Ohnishi, Yusura Takeda, Mayu Terada, Bo Tiojanco, Shih-An Wang, Kento Yamamoto, Satoshi Yokodaido, Tomoshi Yoshikawa, and Jiunn-Rong Yeh. Thank you!
A New Appointment
I am now a member of the Yale Law School Executive Committee. It is a joy to give back to my alma mater. Yale Law School has given me so much, both while I was a student and since my graduation many (many!) years ago.
*** The received wisdom since the failure of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords is that Canada's Constitution is effectively unamendable. This volume starts from a sharper observation: the Constitution has in fact been amended, just not through its multilateral amendment procedures. Constitutional change in Canada has migrated to the unilateral procedures in Part V. Alberta, Quebec, Saskatchewan, as well as the Parliament of Canada have all enacted amendments on their own. This is the best scholarly treatment of a shift that has been unfolding largely without a name.
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The editors ask what the migration to unilateralism means for federalism, for provincial autonomy, and for the legitimacy of constitutional change itself. The book features excellent chapters authored by a stellar cast: Sarah Burningham, Alexandre Cadotte, Dave Guénette, Jesse Hartery, Emmett Macfarlane, Catherine Mathieu, Félix Mathieu, Dwight Newman, Kate Puddister, Emmanuelle Richez, Guillaume Rousseau, Geoffrey Sigalet, Mark Walters, Émilie Weidl, and Kerry Wilkins.
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I was touched to be invited to write the Foreword to this excellent study of constitutional amendment in Canada. Here is the title I chose for my Foreword: Our Frozen Constitution -- and How to Defrost It. Congratulations to the editors!
Three Questions with Nancy Eunice Alas Moreno
MeetNancy Eunice Alas Moreno, an Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan. A Salvadoran lawyer, she is an active participant in the activities of the University’s Iberoamerican Institute. Professor Moreno holds a Ph.D. in Public Law from Doshisha University. I invite you learn more about her here.
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What are you currently writing?
I have just finished writing an article about how Salvadorans are using social networking services as an alternative mechanism for seeking the release of detained individuals because formal habeas corpus proceedings have failed to provide an effective remedy. As a result, an ad hoc procedure has emerged, which I refer to in the article as “habeas SNS.”
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What are you planning to write next?
I intend to examine the constitutional amendments adopted in El Salvador since 2025, with particular attention to the reform of Article 248. This amendment fundamentally alters the constitutional amendment procedure by allowing a single legislative term to propose and ratify constitutional amendments, thereby eliminating the previous requirement of approval by two successive legislatures for their adoption and ratification.
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Which one of your publications (just one!) do you recommend we read to learn more about you and your work?
While Salvadoran legal scholarship has examined presidential power, constitutional reform, separation of powers, and presidential reelection, further research is needed to connect these issues to the historical evolution of the constitutional framework governing the presidency. My article ¿Está realmente permitida la reelección presidencial en El Salvador? contributes to this discussion by examining whether presidential reelection is constitutionally permitted in El Salvador, tracing relevant constitutional provisions and jurisprudential developments.
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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!
Are Tradition and Feminism at Odds?
After Dobbs and Bruen, “history and tradition” has become one of the most consequential phrases in American constitutional law – and, for feminists, one of the most alarming. Why import into rights adjudication the practices of eras when women were subordinated politically, economically, and socially? In her new paper Tradition and Feminism in Constitutional Rights Adjudication, published in the Virginia Law Review, Rachel Bayefsky takes that objection seriously and argues that it is not the end of the matter.
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Her claim is that whether tradition and feminism are at odds depends on what traditionalism actually is. Working through four standard justifications – concrete experience, reliance, democracy, and national identity – she shows how each can support versions of traditionalism that are favorable to the rights of women. If traditionalists prize lessons drawn from lived practice over abstraction, they should attend to women's experiences too, she explains. If they prize continuity over rupture, that counsels against unsettling a century of equality doctrine, including readings of the Equal Protection Clause that would write sex discrimination out of it. She calls the resulting position “dialectical traditionalism,” and applies it to contraception, public single-sex education, pregnancy discrimination, and elsewhere.
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This is an excellent article, both for its doctrinal precision and its historical analysis. It is also unusually generous to the opposing view. I recommend it to anyone interested in reading high-quality scholarship in constitutional law.
Section 1. We the People have compelling sovereign interests in the freedom of speech, representative self-government, federalism, the integrity of the electoral process, and the political equality of natural persons.
Section 2. Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to forbid Congress or the States, within their respective jurisdictions, from reasonably regulating and limiting contributions and spending in campaigns, elections, or ballot measures.
Section 3. Congress and the States shall have the power to implement and enforce this article by appropriate legislation and may distinguish between natural persons and artificial entities, including by prohibiting artificial entities from raising and spending money in campaigns, elections, or ballot measures.
#Mission365
Colleagues around the world have joined me on #Mission365. The newest member of the team is Jorge Barrera-Rojas. Thank you! Your participation gives me added motivation.
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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.
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Please let me know if you, too, will take the challenge!
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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.
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