Associate Professor Jaclyn Neo and co-author, Associate Professor Maartje De Visser (SMU), were awarded the prestigious I•CON Prize for Most Outstanding Article

Associate Professor Jaclyn Neo and her co-author, Associate Professor Maartje De Visser (Singapore Management University), were awarded the prestigious I•CON Prize for the Best Article published in 2022 in the International Journal of Constitutional Law (I•CON). I•CON is the leading international journal in comparative constitutional studies. Every year, the editorial board selects the most outstanding article published in the previous year to award the prize.

The co-authored article “What Would a Pluralist Institutional Approach to Constitutional Interpretation Look Like? Some Methodological Implications” makes the case for adopting a genuinely pluralist perspective when studying constitutional interpretation and sets out the principal forms such inquiries can take. It seeks to go beyond court-centricity that characterized much of the earlier work on constitutional interpretation to encourage more attention on the role of executives, agencies, ad-hoc commissions, and social actors in constructing the meaning of the constitutional text is often downplayed, or altogether overlooked. A pluralist perspective, Associate Professors Neo and De Visser argue, is necessary to fully appreciate the practice of constitutionalism in each jurisdiction and enable more informed analyses of the relationship between constitutions and law-making. Thus, the article explores the methodological implications in designing pluralistic constitutional interpretation studies, focusing on the questions that await investigation, the core variables at play, and the particular hazards in collating and assessing the materials that must be reckoned with.

The award was announced at the closing ceremony of the annual ICON•S conference held in Wellington, New Zealand from 3-5 July.

The article was part of a symposium published in I•CON that included contributions from Prof (Adj) Kevin Tan, CALS Visiting Professor Andrew Harding and Professor Lynette Chua. The set of papers emerged from a workshop on constitutional interpretation beyond the courts organized by the Singapore Chapter of the International Society of Public Law with the support of the Centre for Asian Legal Studies and the Singapore Management University.

The article can be found in the International Journal of Constitutional Law, Volume 20, Issue 5, December 2022, Pages 1884–1913.