 We asked Professor Ren Herschel to give a keynote and to look at the future, to look at what we will be doing or could be doing or also be doing as constitutional law scholars in 2030. Starting in the fall of 2020-21, Ren Herschel joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin as professor of government and the Earl E. Sheffield Regents Chair in law. He studies constitutional law, constitutional institutions, as well as their intersection with comparative politics and with society. He is the author of several very important award-winning books. He has published more than 120 articles and book chapters in leading journals, legal journals, but also other social science journals. He is a co-editor of the Cambridge University Press book series on comparative constitutional law and policy. Professor Herschel has won academic excellence awards in five different countries. He has obtained over 7.5 million US dollar competitive research grants. He is also known, last but not least, for his outstanding performances in classrooms. I talked to former students of Ren Herschel. I think it is safe to say that Ren Herschel is one of the world's leading scholars of comparative constitutional law, courts, and jurisprudence. We are very, very honored, Ren, that you are joining us here today. We are opening the floor, so to speak. It is digitally, of course, to deliver the keynote on constitutional studies for 2030. When I read the slide correct, you will bring forward seven challenges for us. The keynote will be approximately 45 minutes, then we will open the floor for questions, two questions each time, then Professor Herschel will answer them. So without further ado, we are very happy to listen to you. Thank you. Well, thank you very much for this very kind and generous introduction. I hope you can hear me well from across the Atlantic. And of course, many things for the invitation to appear before you. And thank you to all of you that during this tough time for all of us taking the time to listen to my thoughts. And before I start, let me just say that you can have my word that we have not coordinated anything. So the first time I heard about what you guys were talking about earlier today was literally 60 seconds ago. And as you will see, there is some overlap. So I hope that means that I don't know, great minds think alike. So without any further ado, let's just delve into what I have to say by way of an invitation for further conversation. So the starting point of my talk today will be this, the study of constitutionalism has seen considerable renaissance in the last few decades. And we have all the reasons to be pleased with what we've accomplished. But I would want to suggest that before we constitutional scholars become overly satisfied with our accomplishments and with the field's tremendous growth, let's pause for a few minutes to be accurate for 45 or 50 minutes now, and take a broader look at how well the field has responded to some of the greatest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century. And from that, I hope that we may begin to envision a broader, inspiring and ambitious scholarly and teaching agenda for the coming years. So I want to start with what I regard the first in no particular order of seven challenges that I'm going to present today. And the first challenge I call from constitutional law to constitutional studies. So I hope you can see the picture as well. But from the top left, we have the Chilean constitution making process that is taking place as we speak. And then to the top right, we have the constitution making process in Tunisia and the adoption of a new constitution. The bottom left, we have a new constitution to Nepal adopted in 2015 and revised considerably in 2020. And of course, at the bottom right, this is Ms. Miller from the Miller one and Miller two landmark decisions of the UK Supreme Court that I'm sure you're all familiar with. And here we have a bit of a number squeeze, again, from the top for geeks of comparative constitutionalism, I guess, from the top left, we have invoked 25. And that's a reference to the 25th Amendment in the US impeachment of President Trump after January 2021. And then section 155 is, of course, the section of the Spanish constitution considering Catalonia. And at the bottom left, 3707 is a section of the Indian penal code concerning same sex relationship and intercourse that the Indian Supreme Court struck down a couple of years ago. And article nine refers to article nine in the Japanese constitution, hopefully contested in that country concerning pacifism. So you know all of that. I collected this to suggest that constitutional and Supreme courts commonly engage with politics and policy making, and that importantly, they have become a central forum worldwide for dealing with some of the most contentious moral predicaments and some of the hardest fought political questions that define and divide entire nations. And so this global trend in my view is arguably one of the most significant developments in late 20th century and early 21st century government. And it calls on all of us for refreshing the ways we study and teach constitutional law for the 21st century. Here we have another set of slides that again, most of you are familiar with and we have, you know, the rise of challenges to constitutional democracy around the world. I just speak for examples, Orban, unfortunately, we all know. And at the bottom left, Poland, at the top left, we have Malaysia. And at the bottom right, we have Israel with its new basic law prioritizing the Jewish pillar of the country at the expense of the democratic pillar. All of these things suggest, and I could go on and on, but all of these things suggest that today's world admits neither apolitical constitutional law nor constitutionalism free political systems. And so the need arises to complement the strictly doctrinal or exclusively court centric study of constitutional law with what we may call constitutional studies, a more holistic understanding of the constitutional sphere that goes beyond case law and legislation per se. And since the theme of the conference is lawmaking in a hyper complex society, when for me, I try to operationalize this, it means that exclusive focus on constitutional law as a purely doctrinal enterprise may be limiting our horizons and doing this service, frankly, to our students by way of not preparing them in the best possible way for the real life of constitutional law in the 21st century. And we ought to focus on the manifold ways in which constitutional law and courts interact with the political environment within which they operate. I think this is an essential element of constitutional studies beyond doctrinalism. I'm not suggesting we ought to replace the study of constitutional law per se. I'm suggesting we ought to complement it with some insights possibly from the social sciences, political science, economics and statistics, so that our students may be better participants and interlocutors in this business of constitution making and constitutional law in general in the 21st century. So my first challenge is from constitutional law to constitutional studies. The second one is what I call the comparative challenge. And by comparative, I'm not suggesting that all of us ought to become experts in the constitutional law of other countries. But I am suggesting that comparative perspective is key to understanding our own constitutional system. So perhaps the most important aspect of comparative inquiry in constitutional law is self-reflection. And I just quote here two great ones. One is, you know, every time I describe a foreign city, I'm saying something about Venice. And this is, of course, a quote from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and, you know, in the fictional dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. But really, so every time I talk about another city, I essentially talk about my own. And the same idea from a completely different angle by the great Tom Waits, I never saw my hometown until I stayed away for too long. So the message is clear. And the evidence out there suggests that constitutionalism has become a widespread global business. We don't have the time to go into details. And many of you are familiar with this graph courtesy of my friends, Tom Ginsburg and Zach Elkins. But you will see the lines at the top of the graph that show tremendous increase in national constitutions over the last half century. So by crude estimate, we talk about 170 to 180, some say 190 written constitutions around the world. Almost every country has a written constitution and a well-developed system of constitutional law. So the data out there certainly calls for some comparative reference. And I think we can focus within that challenge on two insights. One is that constitutions across time and place are comparable. And so we ought to focus on how people living in different political settings and contexts conceptualize and address constitutional dilemmas that are common to most modern political systems. And the second element is that unlike some comparative disciplines, like say comparative literature, that is mainly for academia, comparative constitutionalism has multiple interlocutors and that as a result, we ought to foster methodological pluralism. We have constitutional courts, constitutional drafters, constitutional scholars, as well as social movements and NGOs. And there are all key epistemological agents of comparative constitutional inquiry, each involved in practicing the art of comparison with their own set of goals and practices and corresponding case selection principles and strategies. So there is no and there cannot be a single unified official method in the comparative study of constitutional law, institutions and practice. But again, the constitutional, the comparative constitutional insight is significant for ourselves or scholars and our students to better understand our own system. We can talk about different, I hope, I cannot hear you, but I hope you're smiling. I can't see the crowd. We can see, of course, so how to compare and what to compare. Oh, now I can see, thank you for the camera. So of course, the point here is not everything is suitable for comparison. So manual gear shift and broccoli, floret and possibly the greatest, I mean, football player of all time, another of today, Lewandowski are not comparable. And these things are too similar by contrast. It's just three broccoli florets. But when we compare, it's probably, and this is this has become a cliche, best to compare what we all refer to as apples and oranges, or in some continental European languages, maybe in Dutch as well, apples and pears, but you get the the third challenge I want to discuss is what I call the global South challenge. So in earlier work that some of you are familiar with, I suggested that the field of, you know, constitutional law in general, and even comparative constitutional law draws heavily on the small number of overanalyzed, usual suspect constitutional settings and court rulings. And that consequently, the constitutional experiences of entire regions remain largely untrauded terrain, understudies and generally overload. And so that unofficial problem poses a set of normative epistemological and methodological challenges that we ought to grapple with as we move forward. Specifically, I want to suggest that the focus on the global South is not merely or even primarily a matter of representation, fairness, ethics or justice. It's simply that many of the more interesting, innovative and daring constitutional developments of the last two decades have taken place in countries and constitutional settings that lie beyond the current contours of the unofficial comparative constitutional channel. Here are two examples related to some of the stuff you talked in the conference, and I will mention that later today. Mexico City embarked upon a major project of city constitutional emancipation from 2013 to 2017, something unheard of in the quote unquote global North. It involved the largest today in about 20 million people experimented in urban constitution making via moderated crowdsourcing resulted in socially progressive so-called CDMX constitution. We can talk about it more in the Q&A. A second example emanating from the so-called global South, and I could bring you 50 of those, is constitutionally entrenched women representation that is enshrined in the new Kenya constitution adopted in 2010. We don't have the time to go into details, but it's a radical experiment in gender parody in all political branches, including the judiciary. The fourth challenge I want to talk about is the environmental challenge. So obviously these photos are well known and unfortunately widely familiar. The science is absolutely conclusive. I know that I'm preaching to the converted here, but still what you have here is global warming in a simple graph, global average temperature from the mid-19th century to our present day, and the trend is obvious. What we have here is perhaps slightly more complex, but not really difficult. We have the average, and I apologize that the y-axis is in Fahrenheit to your left, but I hope it's decipherable nonetheless. So we can see that over the last half century, the vast majority of observations, we have annual observations are well above the average, whereas the 19th century and early 20th century, the vast majority of observations are below average. So clearly we see a same trend, and the line at the center of the figure shows CO2 concentration globally, and it needs no further explanation. It speaks for itself. So over 15 years ago, the idea of giving legal rights to nature was of course at the fringe of environmental legal theory and virtually non-existent and canonical constitutionalism. Today, an increasing number of countries begin to pay attention to the environmental challenge from a constitutional standpoint. The world pioneer, as many of you know in this context was Ecuador that enshrined in 2008 an apropos my call to look to the global south. In its 2008 constitution, the right to nature, we don't have the time to go into details, but the lecture is recorded, and if you want to take a longer look at some of the slides, you're welcome to do that. And so things are gradually reaching countries around us. I'm not familiar sufficiently with the constitutional setting in the Netherlands, but many of you will know that the German Federal Constitutional Court last year made a dramatic decision in the Neubauer case, where it suggested that good fortune of future generations ought to be taken into account, environmentally speaking, in making all sorts of legislative and budgetary planning. A same line of thought has spread around the world, and the Indian Supreme Court has become a trade blazer in that context. Ecuador, not surprisingly, Supreme Court has ruled just less than two months ago on the rights of animals, wild animals, and their legal stature. And things are even gradually penetrating to North America, in this particular case, the United States. So the fourth challenge for 2030 is our engagement with climate change and environmental protection. This is not merely for environmentalists. This is for us constitutional scholars, and we can talk in the Q&A how. The fifth challenge I want to present to you is what I call the urban challenge. And here Dutch scholars, some of you are probably in the audience today, are among the trailblazers globally in that context. But I'm not surprised to hear that that was a major, one of the major themes you've discussed in the conference so far, and I've learned from quite a few of you. So again, the graph and the facts here are rather obvious. Over the last century, the world has seen a dramatic urbanization, urban agglomeration and a decline in other forms of habitation. This is perhaps a slightly more complex figure that requires maybe 30 seconds of explanation. The purple line, I hope you can see that the top represents the world population over the last 70 years. And the blue line at the bottom of the graph represents the rise of urban population over the same time since 1950. And so we can see that the rise of world population and the rise of urban population are roughly parallel. Translation, the vast majority of growth in urban population in sorry, in world population over the last 70 years has translated into tremendous growth in urban population since 1950. This simple graph represents the rise of mega cities and we will talk in a minute on how we define that. But again, it requires no further explanation. The trend is absolutely obvious. So a few numbers just to drive home the message that this is a critical challenge. Nearly a century ago, there were less than 20 cities with population of over one million. We are nearing about 1,000 of those around the world. And cities with either city population per se of over 10 million, we are around 45 or 48 and metro population we are around 70 today and heading towards 90 or 100 in a few years. Perhaps the most really bordering on dystopian news in that respect is that absolutely credible UN projections and that's at the bottom of the slide there for the end of the 21st century suggest that the quarter of the world's population will be living in the world's 100 largest cities and that cities such as Lagos and Kinshasa will reach the estimates of 85 to 90 million people in a single city within the next 50 to 70 years with other cities such as Dar es Salaam Mumbai Karachi following suit not too far behind. And so it's not surprising that even today in 2021 this is by the way a slum in Lagos Nigeria and I hope you can see and feel it. And this is an aerial shot of Mexico City and you can see the fog and smog and it relates to not only how giant the place is but the environmental challenge we talked about before and the place of cities in creating some of the environmental crisis and also finding solutions to it. And so unfortunately however obvious the urban challenge is to many of us in constitutional law and in comparative constitutional law it is almost non-existent still and it's a major challenge that we as constitutional scholars have to address. Here we have I'm a scholar of comparative constitutionalism so I picked three leading textbooks in comparative constitutionalism of the last few years and for the sake of full disclosure I'm as responsible for this neglect until recently because my chapters appear in two of those. So here we have a total of more than 130 chapters in these three books stretched over 2500 pages without a single chapter on the constitutional status of cities home to 56 percent of the world's population. This is a gap and it's upon us to close it. Now as some of you in the room know much better than I do because you are the leading scholars on this issue because cities are not represented constitutionally they some cities have taken the lead proactively in what may be called self emancipation human rights cities and so on. We can't go into details but a few leading examples include San Francisco that incorporated the provisions of CEDAW into its municipal laws and other cities in Asia again we can't go into details. I've written what I hope is a significant book on this a couple of years ago that you're welcome to take a look at named city-state and of course Amsterdam as you know very well and perhaps not surprisingly New Amsterdam as in New York City that is just three months ago adopted a significant experiment in so-called urban citizenship allowing legally documented non-citizens to vote at municipal levels. There has been some awakening at the transnational level as some of you know in attempts by cities to turn instead off to apex courts in their own countries to go directly to in this case European Court of Justice where Anne Hidalgo the very proactive mayor of Paris challenged the Airbnb in what she sees as invasive policy and its impact on the cost of housing in Paris and this is a very important decision from less than two years ago by the European Court of Justice so to recap this the fifth challenge that I see is the urban challenge and the place of cities in our constitutional landscape that is only set to increase considerably by 23. The sixth challenge I want to talk about briefly I know that we may be stretching our luck with time here is the inequality challenge and I want to leave as much time for discussion because this I come to you from no position of authority here this is an invitation for conversation so constitutional law has accomplished wonderful and important things over the last half century in eradicating the jury inequality, formal discrimination. It's incomplete but it has done well however it has done very little if anything to address the business of wealth, the dramatic wealth inequality around the world and within countries and of course I could come up with numerous slides and data on this but I thought this one from a couple of months ago is probably telling to be clear the red column here represents holdings by the top 10% of the world population and so the right side is wealth and the left side is income so if you look at the right side that's right over three quarters of the world's wealth is held in the hands of 10% of the people and the bottom 50% I hope you can even see it is so small the bottom 50% that's about 4 billion people hold all together 2% of the world population of the world the wealth and all of this is while we are told that there has been a dramatic increase in the middle classes in places like India and China so this is an increasing problem of plutocracy worldwide that we absolutely must address if we are serious about constitutional democracy and the data here is you know continues to be stunning the world's 2,000 richest people have more wealth than almost 5 billion people combined whatever your views of constitutional democracy may be I'm thinking this is not compatible with our basic understanding of what at least a basically decent and egalitarian society in global community should look like and so far constitutional law has done very little to address that problem the seventh and last constitutional challenge for 2030 that I want to present is the big brother challenge so of course technological monitoring and biometric surveillance social media data collection by government have profound impact on democracy and on politics in general the numbers are absolutely mind boggling there are about six billion people that are internet users worldwide social media users about four billion and growing Americans just to pick one example with social media profiles the numbers have grown from 10% of Americans in 2008 to 86% today and so we begin to see things that are quite mind boggling again in the bottom right I hope you can see it this is entrance immigration control at the Dubai airport there are no officers you go through this tunnel highly technological tunnel and as you go through the tunnel all your evidence and data in personal parameters and information are checked all you have to do is just to present your passport and you go through and all that data is accumulated somewhere of course Europe has been a global leader in that context with initial ideas some of some of which have become law of you know the general data protection regulation new initiatives to regulate AI and most recently the EU Digital Services Act but this is the only thing we have so far in our constitutional scholarship has been lagging well behind all those challenges technological challenges to privacy data collection and it's not merely big state for me personally the more scary element of it all is big big corporations we could argue about that but that that would be my position in any event we are slightly running out of time and I want to leave plenty of time for discussion the seventh challenge that I regard as important for 2030 is the so-called big brother challenge to recap I presented to you what I think are seven important challenges for 2030 for us as a global community of constitutional scholars those are the challenge of let's call it the holistic challenge that is from constitutional law to constitutional studies or the study of constitutional law is a system within a broader social and political context that may not be fully understood without taking into account the context within which it operates and its multiple links and relationship to the to other political institutions into society the second was the comparative challenge and how are we to incorporate some comparative insights into our study and into our constitutional law curriculum so that our students not only know the world better but understand their own system better the third challenge is the global south challenge so that we expand our inquisitive horizons to you know beyond the half a dozen or dozen usual suspect countries that we always look at to explore interesting constitutional innovation in the so-called global south the fourth was the environmental challenge which we all agree in climate change which we all agree is one of the big challenges we face as humanity and if we want to maintain our intellectual leadership we as constitutional scholars we ought to invest I think greater efforts in thinking collectively about the environmental challenge climate change and how are we as experts in constitutional law are to think creatively to address it the fifth challenge I presented to you is what I call the urban challenge the tremendous increase in urban populations around the world I could go on and on talking about that but the challenge is obvious and I think the COVID-19 pandemic worldwide only exacerbated the challenge because cities and urban centers and municipalities have to deliver many of the services it's a critical challenge we face as humanity in very little has been done about it creatively in constitutional law again with some exceptions some of whom sitting in probably in the room right now the sixth challenge I presented is the inequality challenge there is this tendency among constitutional scholars to talk merely about the jury the legal inequality or equality I think we should extend our horizons to think creatively about other dimensions of inequality and accumulation of wealth that go beyond concepts such as the core minimum in economic and social rights and beyond formal the jury equality by law I think that mission is not complete yet but it is nearing its completion of eradicating blatant inequality from the books so to speak the challenge now ought to shift to the next level of uncontrolled accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few and what it means for democracy and then the seventh major challenge I see for 2030 is of course the technology challenge and the big brother challenge and we can talk about the state as a threat here and or corporations as the threat here which I view as perhaps more significant threat but then that's a matter of personal threat of personal view in in any event it's up to us to be thinking about this creatively and I want to leave you with the conclusion that the study of constitutionalism has witnessed the considerable renaissance in the last few decades but the times are changing as Bob Dylan once saying and so in order to remain relevant and to continue the scholarly momentum that constitutional law has seen over the last few decades closer engagement with some of some of the greatest challenges facing humanity in the 21st century is the call of the hour thank you thank you Ren I don't know whether you heard it but there was a big applause in the room before I open the floor to questions you have shown us seven very problematic situations but rather than just stating that they are very problematic you reframe them as challenges challenges to the constitutional scholars here in the room and also to everybody listening and that's that's good because challenges are things we can take up and we can do something about