CLP Turns 12 || Editorial Notes – Constitutional Law and Philosophy

I am three days late to this, but on August 2, the Constitutional Law and Philosophy blog marked twelve years of its existence (2013 – 2025).

I normally use the opportunity of an anniversary to engage in some critical reflection on what we’ve done on the blog so far, in the broader context of constitutional writing and practice. However, when I go back and read what I had written this time last year – on the eleventh anniversary of the blog – I find that after the passing of a year, it pretty much holds up in the same way that it did when I wrote it. The judiciary’s career over the last year (summed up, to an extent, in my long-ish essay on the direction of the Supreme Court under CJI Chandrachud, has reinforced the feelings that I expressed in August 2024 about the value (or the absence thereof) of examining and analysing judgments from a legal or constitutional perspective. We do it because we have to (and there are many reasons for that, such as demystifying the law, maintaining a record, and so on), but with no particular enthusiasm for the task (as there once was). As I wrote last year, how do you even “analyse” something like this from the Supreme Court?

Of course, there is writing about law and the Constitution that need not be court-centric, and speaking for myself (and not for the other two editors of the blog), I might be doing more of that in the coming year: a more external and critical approach towards the constitutionalism and legal form in general, rather than closely scrutinising court judgments and lamenting about how far they fall short of established legal and constitutional standards.

Thank you, as ever, to everyone who reads, comments, and submits guest posts to this blog, and we look forward to Year 13.