The International Association of Constitutional Law Research Group on Constitutional Interpretation is pleased to announce the call for papers for the international conference on Constitutional interpretation in European populist regimes ‒ new methods or old tools for new purposes? held in Budapest, from 5 to 6 December 2019. The venue of the conference will be HAS CSS Institute for Legal Studies, 1097 Budapest, Tóth Kálmán street 4., T Building, Ground floor.

The IACL Research Group on Constitutional Interpretation has recently been established to provide an effective framework for studying the theories and methods of constitutional interpretation. The Group aims at maintaining the research network of scholars whose fields of interest are closely connected to this subject-matter. The Institute for Legal Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences provides an institutional framework for organizing the activities of this Group.

Our Research Group’s first conference focuses on the question whether European populist systems have developed new, specific constitutional theories, doctrines or methods, or whether their constitutional courts and other high courts continue to use the old, traditional interpretative tools in constitutional adjudication. Submissions for conference papers are invited primarily from legal scholars and political scientists who are interested in the theory and practice of constitutional interpretation. Interested scholars should send an abstract of no more than 500 words by email by 31 July 2019 to szente.zoltan@tk.mta.hu. Successful applicants will be notified no later than 15 September 2019.

The conference papers will be published in an edited academic book and/or by the Hungarian Journal of Legal Studies ‒ Acta Juridica Hungarica, an academic journal founded in 1959 by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

The conference will be also the founding event of the Research Group, as well as the establishment of a Central and Eastern European panel of the IACL Research Group on Constitutionalism in Illiberal Democracies.

There is no registration fee. Group meals will be generously provided by the Institute for Legal Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Successful applicants are responsible for securing their all travel and accommodation costs.