In this issue; Guest Editorial: Unsexing scholarship? Towards better citation and citizenship practices in global public law

The guest editorial which opens this issue is authored by Rosalind Dixon and Mila Versteeg, who consider how the under-citation of female scholars can be addressed. They link this to a number of structural factors: rising academic workload coupled with the “publish or perish” mentality means that academics are under increased pressure to publish, which can exacerbate gender and racial biases in citation. Our Articles section includes six contributions. In the first, Nimer Sultany examines the mounting significance of neoliberalism as a force in the case law of the Egyptian Supreme Constitutional Court, by contrast with the developmental economic vision often espoused by the apex administrative court. This is followed by an article by Vlad Perju, who proposes a theory of “transnational” constitutional norms to explain widely shared democratic commitments, such as judicial independence. In the third article, Shamshad Pasarlay advocates for dialogic incrementalism in constitution-making in fractured societies, contrasting the experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan. In the fourth article, Dimitrios Kivotidis examines the recent legislative overhaul of the Greek administrative state, which he argues must be viewed as part of a broader market-oriented trend of undermining social and political rights in Greece. Next, Maija Dahlberg and Anu Kantola take us inside the process of pre-legislative or ex ante constitutional review in Finland, informed by interviews with key actors involved in the Constitutional Law Committee of the Finnish Parliament. They find that political tensions surrounding the ex ante review process have been increasingly heightened in recent years, due in part to the increased involvement of external legal experts and increased scrutiny from the media. In the final article in this section, Madhav Khosla and Milan Vaishnav consider what is to be learned about the nature of parliamentary government through a close examination of legislative efforts to prohibit law-makers from defecting from one political party to another, comparing the example of India’s new anti-defection law with similar laws in Israel, South Africa, and Pakistan. The issue continues with a focus on failures in constitution-making. Sonsoles Arias analyses the development of the constitution-making process in Kenya, arguing that the influence of partisan political forces ultimately led to the rejection of the new draft Constitution in 2005. Andrea Katz examines the rejection of a new constitution by public vote in Uruguay in 1980, which was designed to legitimize the governing military dictatorship. Whilst technically categorized as a failure of constitution-making, this plebiscite ultimately triggered the process of re-democratization in Uruguay. In consequence, Katz argues that constitutional “failures” can turn out to be long-term successes. Our Symposium section features a collection of articles that assess the past three decades of international cooperation in the fight against corruption. Leonardo Borlini and Anne Peters introduce the symposium by highlighting the transformation that has taken place since the effort to tackle corruption became multi-national. Borlini also authors the symposium’s first contribution, examining the use of monitoring and compliance mechanisms as a means of assessing the success of international cooperation on corruption. Next, Borlini and Cecily Rose argue that the current provisions on international asset recovery in the United Nations Convention against Corruption are inadequate, and scrutinize the domestic laws of Canada, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom which, they suggest, embody the types of ”good practices” that are more effective at securing asset recovery. In her contribution to the symposium, Anne Peters acknowledges that the individualized nature of human rights fits somewhat uneasily with tackling an inherently systemic problem: corruption. However, given the strong human rights framework within the transnational legal order, she concludes that human rights are indispensable in the fight against corruption. Next, Anne van Aaken advocates for the use of behavioral science in international anti-corruption law, which she argues can provide a powerful tool in strengthening anti-corruption measures. Finally, Yarik Kryvoi employs empirical data from international investment treaties and arbitration cases to examine the link between corruption and foreign investment. HH This issue includes seven book reviews, which discuss the dynamic interaction between constitutionalism and algorithms, feminism, Buddhism, authoritarianism, history, and climate change. To be more specific, Lauri Mälksoo reviews The Post-Soviet as Post-Colonial: A New Paradigm for Understanding Constitutional Dynamics in the Former Soviet Empire, highlighting the continued relevance of history and historical grievances for understanding constitutional developments in Central and Eastern Europe and post-Soviet Eurasia. Ruth Houghton reviews Global Gender Constitutionalism and Women’s Citizenship, urging constitutional scholars beyond feminist circles to engage with this book, which is one that addresses issues reaching beyond feminist constitutionalism. In his review of Constitutional Challenges in the Algorithmic Society, Ching-Fu Lin argues that the rise of the algorithmic authority should be accompanied by the rise of a sustainable and resilient constitutional environment backed by human-centered institutional design, as well as ethically and technologically informed norms. In his review of Litigating the Climate Emergency, Marcelo Lozada Gomez invites scholars and practitioners to build on existing materials to address the blind spots and the gap in legal standards to adjudicate human rights-based climate change litigation. Punsara Amarasinghe reviews Buddhism and Comparative Constitutional Law, pointing out the importance of the Asokan persona and the role played by Hindu jurisprudence in developing the Buddhist approach to the state. In her review of Useful Bullshit: Constitutions in Chinese Politics and Society, Han Zhu points out that the concept of “useful bullshit” is not synonymous with Chinese constitutions but can be applied to other socialist or authoritarian constitutionalism or even liberal democracies. Finally, Eddie Bruce-Jones, in his review of Recht und Rassismus: Das menschenrechtliche Verbot der Diskriminierung aufgrund der Rasse [Law and Racism: The Human Rights Prohibition of Racial Discrimination], examines the methodological and substantive contributions of this German monograph. CCL We invited Rosalind Dixon, Scientia Professor of Law at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and Mila Versteeg, Henry L. and Grace Doherty Charitable Foundation Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law, USA, to contribute a Guest Editorial. The production of high-quality legal scholarship depends on three key steps: reading, writing, and citation. Many of us jump between these stages, or iterate between them. We also engage in focused reading and more wide-ranging reading that can inform, generate, and challenge how we do more project-specific reading.1 Each are essential stages in the production of high-quality, rigorous legal scholarship. Yet reading and citation practices are under increasing strain. We are not reading or citing enough, and the reasons are often structural in nature. Academics in many countries are facing increasing workloads, with fewer resources, in ways that have clear flow-on effects for the time available for research. This is a problem in itself, but also one that contributes to other problems—including the reproduction of geographic, racial, and gender bias in our practices of citation. In a recent study published in I•CON, “Unsexing Citation,” we demonstrated a clear and statistically significant difference in the rate at which male scholars are cited compared to the rate at which female scholars are cited.2 We also found that this “gender citation gap” is driven almost entirely by the citation of male scholars, and that there are few signs that this pattern is improving, despite significant other changes in the field aimed at overcoming problems of gender bias and discrimination. This editorial calls on the I•CON editorial board (of which one of us is a member) to address this problem head on—by instituting a new requirement that, as part of the submission process, all authors submitting to I•CON (and similar journals) warrant that they have given explicit consideration to the gender composition of authors cited in their research; and indicating that the editors may take compliance with this requirement into account, as part of the exercise of their editorial judgment. A requirement of this kind is no silver bullet for the problems of academic overwork or various kinds of bias that female scholars may encounter. It does nothing to address the structural origins of current practices of unequal citation in global public law, or to require scholars to engage in exemplary patterns of citation. It is, by design, a relatively weak or “semi-procedural” intervention, that aims to recognize the importance of both academic citizenship and freedom in our collective scholarly practice.3 Hence, there would be nothing (other than ethical norms) stopping a scholar from answering “yes” to this question, without giving proper consideration of the concerns that lie behind it. It should therefore be seen as only one of many steps necessary to counter broader inequalities and biases in our scholarly practice. But it is an important first step: it helps challenge unconscious habits and biases, and puts the author in immediate dialogue in that moment with these questions. This is also especially true if editors take these questions seriously. The starting point for any discussion about academic citizenship must be a discussion of academic workload. Legal scholars in many countries are required to teach large numbers of students and do substantial amounts of administrative work, in ways that leave little time for research. In many countries, these pressures have been worsened by progressive cuts in public funding and increasing managerialism in university governance.4 Add to this a “publish or perish” mentality, or insistence that all academics—including junior academics—produce a high volume of research, and it is little wonder that many of us have limited time to read and digest the work of colleagues. These structural pressures call for a structural response: that is, renewed efforts by scholars and university leaders to win public support for adequate public funding for universities, and to reverse decades of creeping managerialism and bureaucracy in university administration.5 Part of that also involves an effort to prioritize quality and impact, rather than quantity, in academic publishing, in ways that arguably run counter to our emphasis on citation. But it does not have to be the case that writing fewer articles should lead to fewer overall citations (one might imagine more substantial or better sourced pieces). And an emphasis on quality must also be accompanied by changes that make it easier to combine teaching, research, and service, or a balanced academic role and workload. In this sense, there is little real tradeoff between these various goals. Such structural changes, however, require time and resources. The truly hard question is what we do as individuals and a field in the meantime. Considering that structural changes may not be immediately available, there are powerful reasons for us as a collective to insist on greater realism about what it means to be a “good” academic citizen, who excels in teaching and research and service to the field. Otherwise, we risk an epidemic of depression, burn out, and brain drain among current and future law teachers and scholars. These risks are also highly gendered and racialized: many women face additional care burdens at home that make coping with increasing academic workload pressures especially difficult.6 Scholars in the Global South face far greater workload pressures and resource constraints.7 And academic citizenship work is itself often distributed in ways that are far from racially or gender neutral. Women, and especially women of color, are often called on to do far more informal and formal service work than male-identifying colleagues. And this problem often only becomes worse, rather than better, when decision-makers make greater efforts to ensure racial and gender diversity in areas such as panel composition, or the allocation of peer review. Indeed, efforts of this kind can often lead to a form of “diversity tax.”8 This means that we should take a flexible view of what good citizenship means, and one that gives considerable autonomy to individual researchers: no single scholar can mentor or give feedback to everyone in their field, and every scholar will have a capacity to do so that varies over time, depending on health, family, and other care responsibilities. Each scholar should therefore be entitled to make judgments about their capacity to offer certain forms of academic service at a given point in time, and to particular individuals. 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