The International Society of Public Law (ICON-S) is pleased to announce that its 2018 Annual Conference will be held in Hong Kong on June 25-27, 2018, under the auspices of the University of Hong Kong’s Faculty of Law and its Centre for Comparative and Public Law – one of Asia’s foremost centres for the study of public law in all its varieties. This will be the fifth Annual Conference of ICON-S, following the four Annual Conferences (Florence 2014, New York 2015, Berlin 2016, Copenhagen 2017) which have been overwhelmingly successful, thanks to the support of our Members.
ICON-S now invites paper and panel submissions for the 2018 Annual Conference. The overarching theme of the Conference will be “Identity, Security, Democracy: Challenges for Public Law.”
Modern identity struggles and the search for constitutional and legal mechanisms that can accommodate diversity occur at many levels including the national, supra-national, local, individual, and collective; and also involve multiple dimensions: ethnic, racial, religious, gender, sexual, and cultural, to name but a few. In recent years, identity claims and security issues have taken centre stage in law and politics, prompting realignment of domestic, regional and international orders. Technological advancement has to some extent countered traditional security concerns, but has given rise to new ones as well as to issues of privacy and political control. At the same time, democracy, a widely revered political ideal for addressing differences and realising human aspirations, is facing challenges in many parts of the world. How should public law respond to these changing circumstances? Asia – with some of the most diverse cultures in the world, where domestic and regional security threats and human rights violations loom large, and where democracy is a relatively recent and at times fragile phenomenon or still under experimentation – offers a unique setting for fresh thinking on these and other closely-related themes.
The Conference will include a keynote address by The Rt Hon the Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, former President of the Supreme Court of the UK (2012-2017), as well as three plenary sessions featuring prominent jurists, intellectuals and judges, focused on the general themes of the Conference. A provisional program can be found here. At the heart of the Conference, however, are the concurrent sessions during the three-day conference which will be devoted to the papers and panels selected through this Call.
ICON-S particularly welcomes proposals for fully-formed panels, but also accepts individual papers dealing with any aspect of the Annual Conference’s themes. In any case, paper and panel proposals need not be limited to those themes, and may focus on any theoretical, historical, comparative, empirical, jurisprudential, ethical, behavioral, ethnographic, philosophical or practical, policy-oriented perspective related to public law, including administrative law, constitutional law, international law, criminal law, immigration and citizenship law and human rights and may address domestic, subnational, national, regional, transnational, supranational, international and global aspects of public law.
We strongly encourage the submission of fully-formed panels. Panel proposals should include at least three papers by scholars who have agreed in advance to participate. Such fully-formed panel proposals should also identify one or two discussants, who may also serve as panel chair and/or paper presenter. Concurrent panel sessions will be scheduled over two days. Each concurrent panel session will be scheduled for 90 minutes.
We invite potential participants to refer to the ICON-S Mission Statement when choosing a topic or approach for their papers or panels.
ICON-S is by no means restricted to public lawyers! We particularly welcome panel proposals that offer genuinely multi-disciplinary perspectives from various areas of law (including civil, criminal, tax, and labor law), as well as from scholars in the humanities and the social sciences (e.g. history, economics, political science, sociology) with an interest in the study of identity, security, democracy and public law. We welcome submissions from both senior and junior scholars (including advanced doctoral students) as well as interested practitioners.
All submissions must be made through the ICON-S website (here) by January 31, 2018. Successful applicants will be notified by March 1, 2018.
All participants will be responsible for their own travel and accommodation expenses.
We very much look forward to receiving your paper and panel proposals.
See you at ICON-S Hong Kong 2018!
Gráinne de Búrca (NYU) & Ran Hirschl (University of Toronto)
Co-Presidents of ICON-S
Richard Albert (Boston College); Lorenzo Casini (IMT School for Advanced Studies, Lucca); Cora Chan (HKU); Albert Chen (HKU); Rosalind Dixon (University of New South Wales); Kelley Loper (HKU); Joseph Weiler (NYU); Simon Young (HKU)
Members of the ICON-S 2018 Organizing Committee
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