The newest issue of the German Law Journal brings together critical reflections on constitutional transformations, contestations of citizenship, and evolving roles of public institutions in times of crisis. Contributions show both the fragility and potential of law as a site of resistance and reconfiguration—a tension that appears to echo through today’s headlines more widely.

Adam Shinar opens the issue with an analysis of civic mobilization in Israel, juxtaposing the massive protests against the government’s (recently relaunched) constitutional overhaul with the relative absence of public dissent following the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza war. He argues that this asymmetry goes beyond wartime dynamics and reveals tensions within Israel’s liberal protest movement and its efforts to build broad-based consensus towards liberal democratic renewal. Largely bracketing issues like the Occupation and the marginalization of Palestinian citizens, the movement may have implicitly narrowed its moral and political horizon.

Next, Emanuel V. Towfigh and Niklas T. Weyl interrogate the legal and moral significance of borders, citizenship, and migration control. Drawing from jurisprudence, political theory, and international law, they argue that contemporary practices such as pushbacks and passport-based hierarchies reveal a profound dissonance between the formal commitment to human equality and the exclusionary logics embedded in global legal systems. The article calls for a reimagining of the legal architecture that sustains global inequality.

Sara Poli and Luigi Lonardo offer a doctrinal and policy-focused examination of the limits of EU citizenship deprivation in cases involving foreign terrorist fighters. Turning to the legal and ethical questions raised by the exclusion of children from EU territory when their parents are stripped of nationality, the authors highlight inconsistencies in current legal practice and underscore the need for more coherent protections grounded in fundamental rights, in particular of minors.

Aiming at developing a conceptual vocabulary suited to a multipolar legal world, Rodrigo Camarena González proposes a “glocal” theory of constitutional interpretation that accounts for the simultaneous local rootedness and transnational circulation of constitutional ideas. Rejecting both methodological nationalism and an uncritical embrace of globalism, he outlines an interpretive framework attuned to pluralism, hybridity, and the role of judges as nodes in overlapping normative communities.

Bas Schotel and Ingo Venzke revisit the pre-removal detention of immigrants under EU law and challenge the prevailing interpretations of permissible detention periods. Anchoring their analysis in the meaning of “detention” under the European Convention on Human Rights, and acknowledging the living nature of the Convention whose interpretation is however contrained by the interpretative canon, the authors argue for a stricter, more temporally constrained reading that challenges the normalization of prolonged immigration detention as a routine administrative measure.

Finally, Corrado Caruso turns our attention to the digital transformation of European public discourse, asking how foundational freedoms—particularly freedom of expression—can be sustained when mediated by powerful private platforms and algorithmic architectures. His contribution calls for a rearticulation of freedom’s institutional guarantees fit for the complexities of the digital age.

We hope this collection stimulates reflection, debate, and further inquiry.

As always, happy reading,

Klaas Hendrik Eller
on behalf of the GLJ Editors-in-Chief