In this issue; My patria is the book: Ten good reads 2025
In this issue
In this issue’s Editorial, Joseph H. H. Weiler shares his annual “Good Reads”: books to “curl up on the sofa with, maybe even as a respite from an excellent law book.”
The Articles section features eight contributions. Turkuler Isiksel considers the question of what constitutional and/or human rights are corporations entitled to claim, if any? She proposes that we answer this question by taking a purposive approach, arguing that the corporate form is of value primarily insofar as it allows individuals to pursue their ends, values, and life plans in association, such that a corporation’s rights cannot extend beyond what is necessary to fulfil these purposes.
In his article, Terry Skolnik takes up the subject of justification in constitutional law, drawing a distinction between two conceptions of the “culture of justification”: the first is the culture of persuasion—one grounded in rationality, reason-giving, and engagement with the law of the case and the parties’ arguments. Drawing on justificatory defenses in criminal law, Skolnik introduces a second conception of justification: justification as moral permissibility. The article contends that we gain a deeper understanding of a culture of justification—and of proportionality analysis in constitutional adjudication—when we unite the two conceptions.
Alejandra Cárdenas Cerón, Ona Flores Montero and Rosario Grimà Algora explore the role that courts can play in advancing the decriminalization of abortion through proportionality review, with attention to the legality, rationality, necessity, and strict proportionality of criminalizing abortion at any stage of gestation—while arguing that abortion should instead be regulated as any other area of medical practice, subject to evidence-based healthcare laws and guidelines, and complemented by economic, social, and public health policies aimed at reducing unintended pregnancies and supporting motherhood for those who choose it.
Jacob Deem considers the 2023 rejection of a once-in-a-generation referendum proposal in Australia to establish a First Nations advisory body in the Constitution. In the light of this result, and situating his argument within the context of broader studies of political culture, Deem uses original large-n survey data from the Australian Constitutional Values Surveys (2008–21) to examine Australians’ openness to constitutional change over time, arguing that Australians are not inherently opposed to change but are nonetheless susceptible to technical arguments designed to stifle support for this.
The Articles section continues with a contribution by Signe Rehling Larsen, who argues that constitutional tolerance—the voluntary subordination of Member States to EU law—has long defined the European Union’s constitutional order, but that this principle is now under strain as both subordination and its voluntary nature are increasingly contested. Drawing on federal theory, she suggests that constitutional tolerance depends on a precarious federal balance between contradictory commitments to unity and diversity. She argues that the CJEU is developing Article 2 TEU into an enforceable guarantee of shared constitutional values, though this approach sits uneasily with different varieties of constitutionalism throughout Member States, including divergent understandings of democracy and the rule of law.
Ngoc Son Bui then examines how the communist party has been codified in thirty-two constitutions across former and current socialist regimes, identifying waves of constitutionalizing party socialism, and analyses how constitutions define the party’s leadership, ideology and activities, arguing that constitutionalization serves elite interests. However, this article also shows that party constitutionalization is increasingly contested, highlighting the evolving nature of the socialist constitutional tradition.
This issue also features two articles that engage with the horizontal application of constitutional rights from complementary perspectives of constitutional design and constitutional adjudication. Eleni Frantziou challenges the widespread assumption that horizontality is an exceptional feature of constitutional rights. Through a systemic textual analysis of 195 constitutions, she develops a typology of horizontal effect clauses and shows that most contemporary constitutions envisage rights as “horizontal by design,” particularly in young, post-dictatorial constitutions of the Global South.
From a doctrinal and judicial perspective, Gautam Bhatia examines how Jamaican courts have interpreted and applied the Charter’s provisions on direct horizontality over the past decade. Through close analysis of key cases and comparative jurisprudence, the article identifies persistent doctrinal difficulties and proposes an “institutional approach” centered on power asymmetries between private actors, offering a framework for horizontal rights application in Jamaica and beyond.
This issue also features six Afterwords to Nehal Bhuta’s I•CON Foreword (published in the first issue of this volume, 23:1), which explores the foundations of social rights in nineteenth-century constitutionalism. Julia Dehm responds to the Foreword with further avenues for exploration, first raising questions about whose histories of social rights are told and the importance of situating European histories of social rights within a broader colonial political economy; second, calling for further attention to the materialist underpinnings of discourses of social rights, specifically the role that transformations in energy and technology, and the emergence of a fossil fuel economy, play in the periods examined—suggesting that attention to each of these subjects is crucial to addressing contemporary challenges of social provisioning in a deeply unequal and violently stratified global order.
Francisco J. Quintana responds to the Foreword by revisiting debates about the nature and transformation of the state through the lens of human rights in Latin America. He argues that any theory of social rights must consider the international conditions that enable the social state, and that scholars should examine how these broader conceptions of international social rights diminished over time, and the role law played in that shift. Understanding this transformation may clarify how to reconstruct a more ambitious, transnational project of social justice.
Graziella Romeo revisits the nineteenth-century solidarist foundations of social rights, highlighting solidarism’s vision of political community as grounded in mutual social responsibility. She argues that social rights were historically intertwined with capitalism, conceived to temper market forces, but have been weakened by the neoliberal transformation of civil and political rights. As contemporary market practices undermine their emancipatory potential, she argues that social rights must be reconnected to democratic principles and the material conditions of political participation to combat inequality.
Katharine G. Young reminds the reader that Bhuta’s genealogy of origins of social rights does not dissipate the “costly ambiguity” that social rights as a concept retains. This ambiguity touches notably on the collective-natural heritage of social rights and their non-egalitarian dimension.
Ulrike Davy and Albert H.Y. Chen consider Bhuta’s Foreword from the perspective of social rights and policies in nineteenth-century Germany and China, arguing that social rights thinking did not necessarily precede the emergence of the welfare state in these places.
Finally, Andrius Bielskis offers a philosophical engagement with the Foreword from the standpoint of Aristotelian–MacIntyrean virtue ethics, supplemented by Marx’s critique of capitalism. He argues that rights function as juridical responses to ruptured consent within capitalist societies that commodify human activity and privatize the commons. While Bhuta demonstrates the emancipatory role of natural social rights in resisting capitalist exclusion, Bielskis argues that such rights remain dependent on positive law and political power for their validity. He offers an alternative account: that socialist justice—founded on merit and solidarity—prefigures a communist order of grace, in which the language of rights itself may be replaced by relations grounded in consent, excellence, and the free gift.
Finally, Nehal Bhuta offers his rejoinder: to deepen the dialogues begun and highlight further lines of inquiry and possible research.
AB, HH, GR, and JSFW
We are also pleased to include a symposium, featuring six contributions, in this issue on the subject of Constitutional Identity and Illiberalism. In their introduction, the symposium convenors, Tímea Drinóczi and Emilio Peluso Neder Meyer, explain how the symposium explores whether constitutional identity is compatible with illiberal politics. They present a theoretical framework to navigate the symposium’s key findings and argue that the contributions taken together support a reorientation of constitutional identity from a presumed essence to a site of political, legal and cultural struggle.
Svenja Behrendt and Joel Colón-Ríos then dive into the descriptive and normative dimensions of constitutional identity and argue that it sits in tension with both democracy and (il)liberalism. The issues they highlight manifest in both the domestic and the multilevel EU settings. Jaclyn Neo follows with an article that examines the increasing entanglement of constitutional identity with anti-constitutionalist populism. As a response, Neo suggests disentangling the descriptive claim of constitutional identity from its normative claim of immutability.
The symposium then proceeds with contributions focusing on specific jurisdictions. Emilio Peluso Neder Meyer and Tímea Drinóczi explore the Hungarian and Brazilian constitutional systems to identify the main reasons for the enduring nature of the Fidesz political project and the failures of Bolsonarism in Brazil. They argue that constitutional identities can create distinct environments conducive to the survival of illiberal projects. Heinz Klug explores the tensions within South Africa’s constitutional identity and asks whether the post-liberal constitution can sustain transformative identity in the face of illiberalism. In the concluding contribution to the symposium, Valentina Rita Scotti investigates the content of Türkiye’s constitutional identity, describes the complex path of Türkiye’s identity-building, and questions the Kemalist exclusionary approach.
AB
This issue features four book reviews, which engage with a wide range of constitutional themes across diverse jurisdictions, including women and constitution-making, constitutional development in Korea, judicial dysfunction in Indonesia, and the relationship between citizens, community and constitutions. In her review of Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic: Gender Politics of the Framing of the Constitution, Sakshi Sharda analyzes a gendered reading of the debates of the Indian Constituent Assembly. Jeong-In Yun reviews The Constitution of South Korea: A Contextual Analysis, discussing the experiences and lessons of South Korean constitutionalism, which matured through colonial occupation, the Korean War, military coups, authoritarian rule and democratization. In her review of Judicial Dysfunction in Indonesia, Melissa Crouch underscores that political interference in the Constitutional Court remains a serious problem and is closely connected to the return of authoritarianism in Indonesia. Finally, Rosalind Dixon’s review of How to Be a Citizen: Learning to Rely Less on Rules and More on Each Other challenges a stronger version of the book’s claim that it is time to move past legal models of constitutionalism. Instead, Dixon argues that it may be time to renovate and temper our faith in them.
CCL
My patria is the book: Ten good reads 2025
[ICON Co-Editor-in-Chief J.H.H. Weiler’s list of ten good reads for 2025 was previously published on ICONnect in December 2025 at this link.]