Welcome to the IACL-AIDC Blog: A Forum for Global Conversation

Happy new year, Bonne année, Feliz año nuevo! After a short break, we are happy to be back online and looking forward to a new year, with new scholarship, new constitutional developments, and new challenges. 

In 2022, the IACL-AIDC Blog published over 100 posts examining current developments in constitutional law, exploring issues at the cutting edge of academic debate, and introducing readers to new publications through interviews with authors and editors. 

The IACL-AIDC Blog is a global forum for conversation and learning, and we strive to feature blog posts that represent all regions of the world.  In 2022, we remained faithful to these goals, publishing insights and analysis from over 35 jurisdictions, in Africa, the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. We hosted six symposiums, on topics including the rights of nature, court-packing and democracy, global landmark judgments, constitutionalism in Central America and federalism in Lebanon. The outcome of the constitution-making process in Chile – in which a new constitution drafted by a Constitutional Assembly was rejected at a national plebiscite in September – generated an impromptu symposium on the value and limitations of referendums in constitution-making processes. 

In 2022, we also launched a partnership with the new African Law Matters blog, continuing our engagement with constitutionalism in Africa which we began with our Spotlight on Africa series in 2021. 

We have now added Spanish to English and French as the languages of the Blog. We welcome contributions in any of the three languages: information about our submissions process is available on our website. Remember that, as an online platform, we are able to include photos, videos, links and interactive data visualisations as well as text in our posts!  

In 2023, we look forward to hosting symposiums on new scholarship and exploring thematic issues. To begin the year, we have two symposiums planned in the ‘Workshop my Paper’ series - one on Conor Casey and David Kenny’s ‘The Gatekeepers: Executive Lawyers and the Executive Power in Comparative Constitutional Law’, and the other on Jason Mazzone and Cem Tecimer’s Interconstitutionalism – as well as thematic symposiums on territorial autonomy and Pacific constitutions in the pipeline. 

None of the above would have been possible without the work and effort of our editorial team. We thank all our volunteer Assistant Editors and our Associate Editor Lizzy Perham, for all their work in making the Blog a great forum for our contributors and readers. In 2022 we also expanded our team significantly. We welcomed nine new, multilingual assistant editors: Neslihan Cetin, Jesse Hartery, Gaurav Mukherjee, Luz Helena Orozco y Villa, Edgar Ortiz Romero, Alexis Ramirez, Francisco Javier Romero Caro, Orlaith Rice and Maria Savranina. In 2022, we bid farewell to Assistant Editors Iain Payne, Phoebe Galbally and Nomfundo Ramalekana, and we thank them for their contribution.

A core aim of the Blog is to provide an online meeting place for constitutionalist to present their research, share analysis and insights and discuss current issues and events. In December 2022, members of the Blog team were thrilled to meet many of our readers in person at the World Congress of Constitutional Law, in Johannesburg South Africa, and join in important discussions on the theme ‘Constitutional Transformations’. 

For those who could not attend in person, the IACL-AIDC Blog, together with African Law Matters, hosted a symposium on the conference theme, featuring plenary speakers from the World Congress, in the hope of sharing  insights from the World Congress with a wider audience. And of course, we invite all speakers, panel convenors and participants at the World Congress to submit blog posts to share their research with our wider community of constitutionalists. 

Remember to sign up to our mailing list and follow us on Twitter for updates from the Blog. This is your blog, so please get in touch to submit a post, propose a Symposium, suggest a new book for our author interview series, publicise calls for papers or events and share your feedback.

Thank you for your continuing support of the Blog. We wish you all the best for 2023!

Anna Dziedzic and Mariana Velasco-Rivera

Co-Editors, IACL-AIDC Blog