CfP: IACL Melbourne Roundtable - The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective

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An IACL Roundtable will be held in Melbourne on 2-3 May 2016 under the auspices of the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies at Melbourne Law School (co-sponsored by the Comparative Constitutional Law Project at the University of NSW). The convenors are Professor Adrienne Stone and Professor Rosalind Dixon.

The aim of the roundtable is to invite reflection by scholars on the relationship between the textually explicit nature, or  “written-ness”, of constitutional guarantees and courts’ approach to constitutional review in different constitutional contexts.   The workshop will include papers focused on particular country case-studies, but also aim to generate hypotheses about the relationship between courts’ willingness to rely on written, versus, unwritten bases for constitutional decision-making, and factors such as (a) the age of a written constitution; (b) the difficulty of formal amendment under a constitution; (c) the substantive scope of a constitution, or relevant categories of constitutional guarantee; and (d) the general abstraction or prolixity of constitutional language in a particular constitution.

 Confirmed Speakers

  • Professor Lawrence B Solum, Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law, Georgetown Law Centre, Washington DC
  • Dr Iddo Porat, Law School of the Academic Centre for Law and Business, Israel
  • Professor Renata Uitz, Chair of Comparative Constitutional Law Program, Central European University, Budapest.
  • Professor David E. Landau, Mason Ladd Professor, College of Law, Florida State University
  • Professor Jeffrey Goldsworthy, Monash University
  • Professor Yvonne Tew, Georgetown Law Centre

Commentators

  • Professor Claudia Geiringer, Victoria University Wellington
  • Dr Tarunabh Khaitan, Oxford University

Call for Papers

 A small number of places in the Symposium have been reserved for a ‘Call for Papers’.  Contributions on this theme are invited.  While the Symposium is principally for academics, the Convenors are open to considering papers on these themes from doctoral students. Abstracts of 300 words should be submitted to Adrienne Stone (a.stone@unimelb.edu.au) by 30 November 2015.  Doctoral students are requested to include a CV.