GCDC Members Participate in ICON-S 2025 Conference

From Monday, 28 to Wednesday, 30 July, members of the Global Centre for Democratic Constitutionalism (GCDC) participated in the 2025 conference of the International Society of Public Law (ICON-S). The conference, titled ‘At the Crossroads of Public Law: Equality, Climate Emergency, and Democracy in the Digital Era’, was held at the University of Brasília, Brazil. The event brought together leading scholars, judges, and practitioners from around the world to discuss the most pressing challenges facing public law today.

The conference opened with an Early Career Researchers Breakfast Reception, co-sponsored by the GCDC and Max Planck Law. This event gave emerging scholars an opportunity to connect with each other as well as to meet and discuss with members of the GCDC, Max Planck, and ICON-S.

Following the breakfast, the substantive panels saw various GCDC members discuss a range of topics across the field of public law. Nine Centre members (including five PhD students) contributed to over 20 panels at the conference, presenting works in progress and discussing critical issues relating to, among others, democracy, equal protection and non-discrimination guarantees, socio-economic rights, COVID-19 laws across jurisdictions, postcolonial and Global South constitutionalism, constituent power, and constitutional failures.

Professor Erin Delaney, Director of the GCDC and Secretary General of ICON-S, chaired the first plenary panel, ‘Digitalization, Democracy and Authoritarianism’. In the panel, speakers such as Justice Luís Roberto Barroso, Chief Justice of the Brazilian Federal Supreme Court, discussed disinformation and misinformation in an age of authoritarian populism, with a call to ‘make lying wrong again’.

Professor Delaney also presented her paper ‘Flexible, Strong, and Stable? The UK’s Constitution in the Face of Change’ in the panel ‘Constitutional Democracy in Crisis I’. Additionally, she served as a discussant in a panel on ‘Courts as Democratic Knowledge Institutions’ and in a book roundtable on ‘Guardians of Equality: How Courts Conceptualize Equal Protection and Non-Discrimination Guarantees’.

GCDC Deputy Director Professor Jeff King presented on ‘Law and Power in the Age of Emergencies: A Global Study’ in the panel ‘Comparing Covid Laws: A Critical Global Survey’, which also had GCDC member Professor Colm O’Cinneide as Chair. Professor King also chaired a book roundtable on ‘The Entrenchment of Democracy: The Comparative Constitutional Design of Elections, Parties, and Voting’ and a panel on ‘Guarantor (or Fourth Branch) Institutions’.

Dr Berihun Gebeye presented on ‘The Normative and Institutional Alchemy of Postcolonial Constitutionalism’ in the panel ‘Postcolonial and Global South Constitutionalism: Perspectives from Africa II’ and on ‘A Constitutional Theory of Freedom: A Preliminary Inquiry’ in the panel ‘New Perspectives in Constitutional Studies’. Dr Gebeye also chaired panels on postcolonial constitutionalism and judicial decision-making in the Global South.

Professor O’Cinneide, Eve Lister, and Edward Pérez participated in the panels ‘Contemporary Debates on Socio-Economic Rights’ and ‘Taking Stock: The Past, Present and Future of Socio-Economic Rights Adjudication’, with Pérez presenting on ‘Structural Remedies as Tools to Tackle Social Injustice: The Case of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ and Lister presenting on ‘The Human Right to Housing: A Narrative Question’.

In addition, Pérez presented on ‘The “Legal” Attacks Against Civil Society: Anti NGO Laws and Authoritarianism’ in the panel ‘The lus Constitutionale Commune in Latin-America’s Response to Authoritarian Regulatory Frameworks: The Case of Venezuela’. He also served as a discussant for the panel ‘Positive Complementarity: Dialogue Between International and National Courts’.

In a panel on constitutional failures, Natalia Morales-Cerda presented on ‘Separating the Wheat From the Chaff: Chile’s 2019-2022 Constituent Process From the Narrative of Non-Failure’, with GCDC Director Professor Erin Delaney as a discussant. Morales-Cerda additionally chaired a panel on fourth branch institutions.

Gabrielle Elliott-Williams presented on ‘Gender Justice and Decolonial Constitutionalism: The Caribbean Court of Justice’s Regional Lawmaking’ in a panel on ‘Decolonising Constitutions and Decolonial Constitutionalism in the Caribbean’.

Finally, Kevin James presented his paper ‘Interrogating the Claim of Federal Exceptionalism in Relation to Constituent Power Theory’ in a panel titled ‘Issues in the Theory of Constituent Power’.

Alongside the various panels featuring GCDC members, the Centre also hosted, along with Max Planck Law, a panel titled ‘Researching Constitutional Resilience in Turbulent Times’. This panel explored key challenges in researching constitutional resilience, the most pressing issues in the field, the significance of interdisciplinarity, and the role of the academy in advancing this work.

Ultimately, the ICON-S 2025 conference offered a valuable platform for knowledge exchange and reflection on pressing issues of contemporary relevance within public law. The breadth of participation by GCDC members reflects the Centre’s commitment to advancing knowledge on issues relating to democracy, constitutional resilience, and beyond.