Editorial: Welcome to a New (Northern Hemisphere) Academic Year

Seána Glennon, Elisabeth Perham, Pravar Petkar & Mariana Velasco-Rivera

Co-Editors, IACL-AIDC Blog

26 August 2025 marks the first publication day for the Blog after our hiatus for the Northern Hemisphere summer period. There are plenty of exciting updates at the Blog, including personnel changes, new collaborations and announcements!

Personnel Changes

We are delighted to be welcoming a new Co-Editor to the Blog in autumn 2025. Dr Seána Glennon, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Ottawa, will be joining our team. She is working on the Unwritten Constitutional Norms and Principles Project with Professor Vanessa MacDonnell of the uOttawa Public Law Centre, and her research interests are in constitutional law, citizen participation in constitutional change and deliberative democracy.

This autumn, we are sad to say goodbye to two of our Co-Editors, Dr Elisabeth Perham and Dr Mariana Velasco-Rivera. They have both made significant contributions to the Blog’s success and progress in recent years, both as Co-Editors and Associate Editors prior to that. We have also had Jesse Hartery finish his time as an Assistant Editor of the Blog. We thank them all for the time they have given and are immensely grateful to them and our entire team for their work. You can view details of the rest of the team here.

Symposia

The Blog remains committed to hosting symposia to cultivate inclusive conversations and act as a meeting place for constitutionalists across the world to engage and share in discussions. This includes our ‘Workshop My Paper’ Series, which aims to generate dialogue around recently published scholarship.

We were very pleased that the Blog has been able to facilitate conversations earlier this year around Professor Theunis Roux’s paper in World Comparative Law/Verfassung und Recht in Übersee entitled ‘Grand Narratives of Transition and the Quest for Democratic Constitutionalism in India and South Africa’. The symposium was guest edited by Anmol Jain and can be found here.

Later this year, we look forward to hosting symposia on Professor Gila Stopler’s book Women’s Rights in Liberal States (Cambridge University Press 2025), guest edited by Professors Cora Chan and Ros Dixon, and on Democratic Consolidation and Constitutional Endurance in Asia and Africa, co-edited by Professors Tom Daly and Dinesha Samararatne (a video interview with the editors about the latter book can be found here).

Collaboration with Constitutional Studies

We were delighted to contribute to the re-launch of Constitutional Studies as an international journal earlier this year, with a piece co-authored by Elisabeth Perham, Mariana Velasco-Rivera and Pravar Petkar in the June 2025 issue on the work we do at the Blog. The journal is open access and can be viewed online. Its next issue is in December 2025. Announcements about new issues and submissions will be shared on the Blog.

World Congress of Constitutional Law

We are pleased to continue to provide a home on the Blog for information about the upcoming World Congress of Constitutional Law, which will be hosted by Universidad Externado de Colombia from 6-10 July 2026. Key information can be found on the main conference site, with the Blog also playing a role in keeping IACL members and others interested in constitutional law updated about the IACL Congresses.

The first phase of the Call for Abstracts for the WCCL 2026 is currently open until 30 September 2025, with more details available here.

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. We are also happy to receive proposals for Author Interviews (in both written and video format) on new books, and Calls for Papers or other announcements of interest and relevance to a global audience of constitutional lawyers.

We wish all our readers a safe and prosperous remainder of the year, and thank you for your continued support!

Seána Glennon, Elisabeth Perham, Pravar Petkar & Mariana Velasco-Rivera

Co-Editors, IACL-AIDC Blog

Editorial: Welcome to a New (Northern Hemisphere) Academic Year — IACL-IADC Blog