Editorial: Welcome to 2025 on the IACL Blog

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Elisabeth Perham, Mariana Velasco-Rivera & Pravar Petkar

Co-Editors, IACL-AIDC Blog

4 February marks our first publication day for 2025, after the team took a hiatus over the Southern Hemisphere summer. It has been some time since we have penned an editorial – there has been a lot going on at the blog, so we thought it was time to provide some updates!

Personnel changes

One exciting new development is that we welcomed a new Co-Editor in mid-2025 – with Dr Pravar Petkar stepping up from his role as Assistant Editor. Pravar is a Researcher at the International Centre for Sustainability in London. He works on constitutional and democratic reform across the UK and India, with a particular interest in participatory and deliberative democracy, territorial pluralism and the basis for constitutional legitimacy.

We are also sad to say goodbye to Irene Parra Prieto, who has stepped down as the Associate Editor of the blog as of December 2024 after over a year of service but delighted to welcome Natalia Morales Cerda to the team. Natalia is currently a PhD candidate at the UCL Faculty of Laws, looking at women’s political representation and participation in constitution-making process, with a focus on the Chilean process 2020-2022. The Associate Editor has the very important job of managing the day-to-day running of the blog, and so if you write to the blog, you will very likely be hearing from Natalia (in the transitional period you may have been hearing from Elisabeth a bit).

We have had lots of new faces come onboard as Assistant Editors in the last year, including Bruno Cunha, Dr Saiorse Enright, Dr Mariana Kato, Guy Kelleher, Francesco Lucherini, Candice Maharaj, Maxime Millon and Alemayehu Weldemariam. We have also had a few people finish their time as Assistant Editors, including Dr Ayesha Wijayalath, Dr Orlaith Rice and, Dr Marie Gren. Our whole editorial team work on a voluntary basis, and we are so grateful to everyone for their work – you can check out the whole team here.

Symposia

In pursuit of our aim of cultivating conversations and providing a meeting place for constitutionalists to share views and engage in discussions, we are very committed to hosting symposia. These allow for sustained discussion of topics of mutual interest and assist us in ensuring that the conversations we facilitate are global in focus. In 2024, we hosted a range of excellent symposia, including:

·       Federal Coalitions and Subnational Democracy, in collaboration with the Eurac Research Institute for Comparative Federalism and guest edited by Elisabeth Alber

·       Freedom of Association Collaboratively and Comparatively, coming out of the Societas project at the University College Cork School of Law and guest edited by Maria Cahill and Cinzia Ruggeri

·        Animals in Constitutional Law, guest edited by Eva Bernet Kempers and Yaffa Epstein.

We also started hosting new occasional blog series entitled Spotlight on the Venice Commission, as part of the longstanding cooperation between the IACL and the Venice Commission. That series will feature occasional contributions from scholars focussing on important opinions of the Venice Commission    

We are starting off 2025 with a few exciting symposia. First up is a small symposium, starting today, featuring a series of scholars reflecting on Raffael Fasel’s new monograph More Equal than Others: Humans and the Rights of Other Animals (OUP, 2024) . We then have a new instalment in our Workshop My Paper series, with a range of scholars from around the world responding to Theunis Roux’s article in World Comparative Law entitled ‘Grand Narratives of Transition and the Quest for Democratic Constitutionalism in India and South Africa’. That symposium is being generously guest edited by Anmol Jain. Towards the middle of the year, we are looking forward to hosting a symposium guest edited by Marie Gren, entitled ‘CONVERSE: Reverse Constitutionalism’, and focussed on a ‘rewriting’ of the French Constitution by foreign scholars, in dialogue with French scholars.

 As always, we are very open to discussing the possibility of other symposia later in the year – more information can be found here, and please be in touch if you have proposals or questions.

World Congress of Constitutional Law

We are also pleased to provide a home on the blog site for you with information about the upcoming World Congress of Constitutional Law, to be hosted by the Universidad Externado de Colombia from 6-10 July 2026. While the key information can be found on the main conference site, we know that the blog plays an important role in keeping IACL members and many others interested in constitutional law informed about the IACL Congresses.

General call for submissions

As always, we also continue to be open to submissions of blog posts on any area of constitutional law of interest to a global audience, broadly construed. We accept submissions in English, French and Spanish. If you have a new book that would like to share some information about with a global audience, we are also happy to receive proposals for author interviews. And finally, if you have a Call for Paper or other type of announcement that you think may be of interest and relevance to a global audience of constitutional lawyers, do let us know.

We wish all our readers a safe 2025. Thank you for your continuing support of the blog.

Elisabeth Perham, Pravar Petkar and Mariana Velasco-Rivera

Co-Editors, IACL-AIDC Blog