Successful Leiden edition of Constitutional Law Conference
Since 1973, scholars of constitutional law have gathered for the annual Constitutional Law Conference. This conference is organised alternately at a location chosen by one of the Dutch law faculties.
The most recent edition of the conference, which took place on Friday 13 December 2024, was organised by Gert Jan Geertjes and Wim Voermans of Leiden Law School’s Department of Constitutional and Administrative Law. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘The constitution outside the Constitution’.
The theme of this conference edition in Leiden was taken from Ernest A. Young's article of the same name (Yale Law Journal 2007, pp. 408-473). In his article, Young considered the implications of extra-canonical rules and developments for thinking on constitutional law. The aim of this conference was to formulate new answers to this topic more than 15 years later.
The conference began with a plenary session in which prominent speakers from the Netherlands and abroad reflected on the theme. The contribution of Roel de Lange (Erasmus University Rotterdam) was called Constitutional Law’s Time. Adam Chilton (University of Chicago School of Law), Anne Meuwese (Leiden University) and Mila Versteeg (University of Virginia Law School; also a distinguished fellow at Leiden University) focused on the way in which the existence and effectiveness of unwritten and written norms can be measured. Anne Meuwese drew attention to a specific angle around this topic, namely the constitutional aspects related to the regulation of AI.
After lunch, workshops were held in which participants could choose between two workshops over two sessions. The first two workshops dealt with legal protection against AI in the Netherlands, the UK and Italy respectively (presented by Ola Al Khatib (Utrecht University), Giulia Gentile (University of Essex) and Siân McGibbon (University College London)) and on the conceptualisation of unwritten rules and conventions (presented by Jerfi Uzman (University of Amsterdam) and Gert Jan Geertjes (Leiden University)). The workshops in the second session dealt with the so-called Spitzenkandidaten procedure in the European Union (Thomas Beukers (University of Amsterdam) and Vestert Borger (Leiden University)) and the emergence of ‘new’ rights against the background of recent challenges such as digitalisation and climate change (Ingrid Leijten (Tilburg University) and Luisa Pinto e Netto (Leiden University)).
The organisers look back on a well-attended and successful conference which produced many interesting discussions. A number of contributions will be developed further for an English-language volume to be published in late 2025 or early 2026. More information on this will follow later.