Category: Editorial

I have invited Ran Hirschl, who has recently joined our Board of Editors, to write the Editorial for the first issue of 2013. His contribution follows below. From comparative constitutional law to comparative constitutional studies Eighty years ago, John H. Wigmore, author of the seminal Panorama of the World’s Legal Systems, characterized the comparative law journals of his time as offering an abundance of valuable materials on the customary laws of the Lagos and Bantus, on the principles of inheritance in Mohammedan Law, on the early sources of Rumanian Law, or on the principles of marriage law in China or in South Africa; but almost nothing by way of comparing and contrasting the ideas in different systems, and of elucidating their correspondence or divergence—in short, of the evolution of legal ideas.

I·CON Volume 11 Issue 1 Table of Contents Editorial Articles Or Bassok and Yoav Dotan, Solving the countermajoritarian difficulty? Asem Khalil, Beyond the written constitution: Constitutional crisis of, and the institutional deadlock in, the Palestinian political system as entrenched in the basic law Adam Shinar and Anna Su, Religious law as foreign law in constitutional interpretation Lars Vinx, The incoherence of strong popular sovereignty   Symposium: The Boundaries of Public Law  Michel Rosenfeld, Rethinking the boundaries between public law and private law for the twenty first century: An introduction

I have invited my co-Editor-in-Chief, Michel Rosenfeld to write the Editorial for our last issue for 2012. His contribution follows below. Individual rights and the excesses of individualism: Heading back to a Hobbesian state of nature? In Hobbes’s vision, the state of nature is one of extreme individualism leading to a war of all against all and in which human life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Announcing ICONnect and a major change in the masthead When I took over I.CON some three years ago, one of the changes I announced in its orientation would be to expand the intellectual and academic reach of I.CON to include all spheres of public law—given the blurring of lines between the Constitutional, the Administrative, and the Global.