The International Association of Constitutional Law is meeting in Athens, Greece, June 11-15, 2007. This year, for the first time, this association has agreed to include a workshop on subnational constitutions. The workshop will be chaired by Antonio Hernandez of Argentina and Robert Williams. This workshop is scheduled for Wednesday, June 13, 2007, from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. The website for the conference is www.iacl-aidc.org. If you go to that website, and click on “Workshops,” our Workshop is listed as number 11 (“Subnational Constitutions in Federal States”). If you click on that, you will go to our Workshop’s homepage. There, you will find guidelines for the submission of papers (which do not need to be formal) and a mechanism by which you can submit comments. The deadline for paper submissions is the end of April. After that date Antonio and I will organize the order of presentations and discussion.
The IACL sponsors are very clear that they are interested in comparative presentations, rather than just “country studies.” Alan Tarr has already posted a paper on the website, with which many of you are familiar, which outlines an agenda for comparative subnational constitutional research and discussion. That is, of course, only a starting point. The deadline for posting a paper is in April, so there is some time for presentation of papers and discussion through the comment mechanism on the home page prior to the actual workshop in Athens in June.
To receive a hard copy of the conference program, or to ask questions, write to Mrs. Aspasia Giannopoulou, of the congress secretariat at agianno@eplc.gr.
We hope to encourage a very wide and substantive interchange at the workshop. This will be our first major step since we formed the International Association of Subnational Constitutional Law in Bellagio, Italy. We see it as very important in the advancement of this new subfield of comparative constitutional law. We hope that you will be able to attend and participate, but if you are not able to do so please pass this information on to your colleagues who are interested in federalism and subnational constitutions.
Please respond to Bob Williams at rfw@camden.rutgers.edu if interested.