Introduction: The popular Mr. Roznai

Abstract

Being on the Editorial Board of an academic journal, one of the first lessons you learn is that it is harder to find somebody to write a decent book review than its is to find somebody to take care of your pet for a whole week of vacation. This has many reasons, of course. Two of them, however, seem to be of particular importance: First: Writing a decent book review is a lot of work. And second: It is a lot of work that will (typically) be unrewarded because hardly anybody seems to be into reading book reviews nowadays (except the author of the book, of course; which, honestly, can only make matters worse). So, without making a great deal out of it, Claudia, Harald, and I when moving the ICL Journal to De Gruyter, decided, to simply stop actively pursuing our friends and colleagues asking them to contribute to the Journal’s Review Section. Not to be misunderstood: This is not to say that the Journal will (or does) not feature any reviews. It is to say that we sit back and wait until (typically young) academics approach us, suggesting to write a review on a recently published volume within the ICL Journal’s scope or submitting a review right away (needless to say: the highly preferred alternative). So, when the idea of having a mini-symposium on Yaniv Roznai’s (truly magisterial) book on ‘Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments’ came up, we were torn. On the one hand we were intrigued by the idea, because we knew how exciting Yaniv’s work was (after all, he had already published with us earlier which is the most reliable indicator for high-quality scholarship we know of). On the other hand, we were skeptical whether we would be able to find suitable contributors (in due time).