Editorial: Changes at the Blog, and Looking Forward to the Rest of 2023

Elisabeth Perham & Mariana Velasco-Rivera

University of New South Wales & Maynooth University

After a busy summer and a well-deserved break, we are happy to be back to business at the IACL Blog. The new northern hemisphere academic year is bringing a lot of changes, in particular in the leadership of the IACL and the IACL Blog, respectively. Professor Adrienne Stone recently concluded her tenure as President of the IACL and Professor Helle Krunke was elected as the new President. It was a pleasure to work with Professor Stone for the past few years. Without her support and guidance the IACL Blog would not be what it is today. We are excited to work with the new President of the IACL, Professor Helle Krunke.

Here at the Blog, we are sad to say goodbye to Anna Dziedzic who stepped down as Co-Editor of the Blog to take an exciting new job. Anna will be sorely missed but we wish her all the best in her new role. As our readership may already know, our Associate Editor, Elisabeth Perham, recently stepped up as Co-Editor of the Blog but continued to perform Associate Editor’s tasks. Anna’s departure meant that we needed to fill the Associate Editor position. We are delighted to welcome Irene Parra Prieto as the new Associate Editor of the Blog. 

The new academic year will also bring exciting symposiums, posts, and interviews. We have an upcoming symposium on territorial autonomy beginning next week, guest edited by Elisabeth Alber and Sia Spiliopoulou Åkermark and bringing together a range of experts, many of whom convened at a June workshop, to discuss aspects of the theory, research methodologies, and practice of territorial autonomy in Europe and across the world. Later in the year, the Landmarks Judgments symposium series, guest edited by Eleonora Bottini, will continue – this time with a number of posts considering landmark judgments in a number of European jurisdictions. Plus, there is much more to come in this second half of the year, as we continue to pursue our mission of providing a meeting place for constitutionalists from all over the world – importantly including in the jurisdictions that don’t often attract global attention – to share their research and discuss important topics in constitutional law.

As our readers may already know, the editorial team of the IACL blog is based in multiple parts of the world, including but not limited to Australia, Ireland, the UK, Denmark, France, Italy, Canada, the US, Guatemala and Mexico. This means that many of us work together on a daily basis but have never met in person. This past July, however, the three Co-Editors of the IACL Blog were in the same place at the time for the first time ever! 

The occasion for this happy encounter was the conference in Queenstown (New Zealand) of an exciting editorial project we three are involved in called Constitutional Heroines? The project is being led by Professor Rosalind Dixon and Professor Erin Delaney. It examines female judicial leadership in a comparative perspective and includes contributors from all regions in the world. Watch this space for more information on this exciting project.

Finally, we want to take this opportunity to remind our readers that, in addition to English and French, we are now accepting submissions in Spanish. Information about our submission 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!  

Remember to sign up to our mailing list and follow us on X 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.

Elisabeth Perham and Mariana Velasco-Rivera

Co-Editors, IACL-AIDC Blog