Editorial
In this issue
This issue opens with two I•CON Keynotes, which were respectively the opening and the closing keynote addresses at the NYU Research Symposium on Legal Empowerment and Autocracy, held earlier in 2026, and co-hosted by the Bernstein Institute for Human Rights at NYU School of Law and NYU Accra in Ghana.
In his address, Raymond Akongburo Atuguba argues that it is not democracy in Africa that is declining, it is Western liberal democracy. The author explains that something new is unfolding in Africa, where democracy is being experimented with in ways that challenge the general commentary on democratic decline. Africa is seeing rural areas becoming increasingly empowered, with citizens learning to use the law. Legal empowerment in this way becomes a central component of democracy.
Justice Syed Mansoor Ali Shah, in his closing address, examines why judicial independence collapses under autocracy and what legal, institutional and cultural resources are required to resist that collapse. Drawing on the author’s experience of resigning from the Supreme Court of Pakistan following the introduction of the 26th and 27th Constitutional Amendments, the Keynote argues that 21st-century autocracy operates not by abolishing constitutional forms but by hollowing them from within, a phenomenon the literature identifies as autocratic legalism.
The Articles section features nine contributions.
Raffaela Kunz argues that open science both reflects and reinforces deeper structural transformations in science. These developments constrain the autonomous functioning of science, creating new dependencies on political priorities, commercial interests, and algorithmic visibility, and, as such, should be recognized as a constitutional concern. Drawing on constitutional sociology, the article underscores the need to rethink fundamental rights frameworks to account for emerging threats to scientific autonomy.
Anthony Sangiuliano explores the role of causation in comparative constitutional theory. The article explores two high-profile Supreme Court of Canada decisions on causation in Canadian constitutional law and introduces a novel methodological device for interpreting statements about causation in judicial opinions in constitutional cases, which the author refers to as “exposition.”
In his article, Pranav Verma presents an empirically informed account of public interest litigation (PIL) before the Supreme Court of India over the forty-five years since its inception. Through hand-coding of the dataset, the author finds a diminishing presence of poor and disadvantaged petitioners in PIL cases, which contrasts with the PIL movement’s initial logic. The article also shows a growing number of regulatory matters transforming the Court into a powerful regulatory actor.
Maria Kotsoni then offers an up-to-date and comprehensive comparative analysis of the ways in which the constitutional fiscal rules introduced in Greece and Italy following the Euro crisis have affected fundamental social rights. She shows the long-term influence of the constitutionalization of fiscal rules beyond the Euro crisis and their persistent constraining effects on the protection and realization of fundamental social rights.
The Article section continues with a contribution by Endre Orban, who takes a close look at the adoption of Hungary’s new Constitution and the subsequent significant polarization among Hungarian constitutional scholars. The author analyses whether academic opinion remains divided regarding Hungary’s Fundamental Law or whether a convergence of views has taken place, and finds that a vast majority of scholars now hold a critical view of Hungary’s constitutional framework.
Tanzil Chowdhury argues that British constitutional reforms are historically specific expressions of the mediation of significant antagonisms between competing social forces, or shifts in the modalities of capitalism. Outlining but rejecting a Marxist reading of law, this article conceptualizes constitutions as a “moment” in the contradictory totality of capitalist social relations.
In their jointly-written contribution, Katalin Kelemen, Maija Dahlberg, Åsa Elmerot, Mikael Kenno Fogde, Haukur Logi Karlsson, Helle Krunke,Morten Nadim, and Nicklas Pettersson, present the first comparative empirical study of constitutional reasoning in the Nordic countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden). Drawing on forty leading constitutional cases from each of the seven examined courts, the authors apply the CONREASON method to map how arguments and key constitutional concepts are used in judicial decision-making. By combining quantitative and qualitative analysis, the study provides new insights into the evolving Nordic constitutional culture and its position in the global spectrum of constitutional reasoning.
Alessandro Ferrara defends a political-liberal conception of constitutional identity, contrasting it with procedural and existential conceptions, and studies the constraints that constitutional identity imposes on the electorate’s amending power, as per a sequential view of democratic sovereignty. Rawls’s teleological justification for such limits is critically examined, and the gist of his view is defended on the basis of the idea of a vertical reciprocity among all the free and equal generations of a people.
In the last article in this section, Ivo Gruev uses Bulgaria as a case study to demonstrate how the constitutionalization of gender can impede progress toward women’s rights and gender equality. The analysis centers on two cases of the Bulgarian Constitutional Court, in 2018 and 2021, where the Court can be seen as a central force driving this process, thereby entrenching a particularly regressive constitutional framework on gender.
The I•CON: Debate! section features two contributions.
Barak Medina returns to the Israeli Supreme Court’s recent decisions invalidating constitutional amendments that were part of the government’s “Legal Reform” and shows how these decisions relied on the concepts of democratic legitimacy and constitutional identity. This conceptual lens of analysis allows a better understanding of the doctrine of unconstitutional constitutional amendment. The author argues that the weight of the legislature’s procedural legitimacy in enacting constitutional norms is not fixed but varies with the extent to which the amendment entrenches the unwritten constitution.
In their Reply, Issi Rozen-Svi and Meir H Yarom challenge this proposal that the more a Basic Law aligns with Israel’s unwritten constitution, the less procedural legitimacy it requires. They highlight ambiguities and risks of selectivity, while ultimately arguing that Medina’s proposal risks legitimizing rights-infringing amendments under conditions of majoritarian consensus, thereby undermining the very minority groups it seeks to protect.
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This issue features five book reviews engaging with a wide range of constitutional themes across diverse jurisdictions, including gender recognition, judicial selection, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and federalism in the United States. In her review of Gender Recognition and the Law: Troubling Transgender Peoples’ Engagement with Legal Regulation, Lena Holzer examines the future of gender recognition and legal gender regulation. Ahmed Elbasyouny reviews Constitution-Building After the Arab Spring: A Comparative Perspective, identifying important questions that have been raised but not yet fully addressed in this field. In her review of Une fièvre américaine: Choisir les juges de la Cour suprême, Nicoletta Perlo underscores the political role of constitutional justice and the utility of public hearings in the nomination process. Lucas Lixinski, in his review of La tutela ejecutiva en el sistema interamericano de Derechos Humanos: Siguiendo las huellas del cumplimiento, reflects on the implementation of decisions rendered by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. Finally, Emil Krude‘s review of Reimagining the American Union: The Case for Abolishing State Government reconsiders whether, and to what extent, federalism in the United States ought to be reformed.
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