1. Introduction

In their recent article ‘Europe’s political constitution’, Alexander Somek and Elisabeth Paar conclude: ‘scholactivism is the form of constitutional law of Europe. There is nothing below or above it. It is all there is’.Footnote ¹ In this reply I want to take issue with such (rather bleak) view of what European constitutional scholarship is about. It builds on my earlier article, which criticised academics, who were invoking academic freedom (and the privileges which come with it) for other objectives than what I see as the key purpose of scholarship: ‘the pursuit of knowledge’.Footnote ² Not only were those academics relying on academic freedom when promoting their private interest or political agenda; by doing so they were undermining the very conditions under which academics can stay protected from the pressures coming from various forms of power – public (eg, authoritarian governments), private (‘a new patron class’),Footnote ³ or communicative (media of all sorts).

However, there is another issue that I want to address in this Reply: Somek and Paaar describe the engagement with contemporary issues by European academics on blogs and other platforms (particularly Twitter) as part of public sphere, which forms part of Europe’s political constitution.Footnote ⁴ I think we (European constitutional scholars) should be more critical towards the ‘infrastructure’ of such ‘digital public sphere’,Footnote ⁵ and perhaps more protective of the existing practices that we inherited from our predecessors.

In what follows I firstly shortly summarise the key points of Somek and Paar’s conceptualisation of Europe’s political constitution (Section 2). Then I explain why relying on Hannah Arendt’s notion of ‘public sphere’, as they do, does not really give us the critical tools needed to understand the normative potential of public sphere (and what we should be mindful of when participating in it – Section 3). Section 4 then applies the framework of analysis introduced by Jürgen Habermas and those who have built on his workFootnote ⁶ to problematise Somek and Paar’s uncritical take on blogs and particularly social media platforms. In Section 5, I get back to the issue of scholactivism in order to explain why we should look elsewhere than to Hans Kelsen in order to navigate the space between scholarship and politics. Section 6 outlines what can be considered the pursuit of scholarly knowledge, not depending on some questionable (and some of them long time ago refuted) assumptions about what counts as ‘science’. All this is done in the awareness of contingency of all ‘rules’ one can prescribe for themselves and others, as put forward in Section 7. Section 8 concludes with an invitation to further debate.

2. Public sphere lending unity to the ‘fragile structure’ of Europe’s political constitution

The first half of Somek and Paar’s article deals with the nature of Europe’s political constitution and deals with other actors than scholars. It conceptualises the structure of European law as ‘transnational’, ‘characterised by a persistent duality of verticality and horizontality’.Footnote ⁷ It emerges from the interactions at the horizontal level (among national constitutional courts in particular), but also contains the vertical – supranational – dimension embodied in the Court of Justice (and other EU institutions). The Court’s pronouncements on primacy notwithstanding, Europe’s constitution lacks a clear hierarchy, and the participating actors only yield one to another, subject to various conditions (such as the ‘so long as’ reservation made by national constitutional courts, or the respect for national constitutional identities, enshrined in Article 4(2) TEU).Footnote ⁸ Somek and Paar get inspiration from Armin von Bogdandy’s recent work on European public law in order to explain what holds this heterarchy (of states, peoples, institutions and other actors) together: European society and its public sphere, with Article 2 TEU at the centre.Footnote ⁹

Von Bogdandy reads Article 2 TEU in a ‘republican’ way and argues: ‘Since 2009, the republican manifesto of Article 2 TEU offers a collective singular: society. Society is in no way inferior to terms such as people, state, nation, and constituent power. An important difference, however, is that state-centred thinking does not claim it as a central category, unlike the other terms’.Footnote ¹⁰ Relying on the concept of society therefore appears rather strategic than analytical: since it has not been appropriated by those who insist to study the nature of the EU in the traditional (that is, bound to the state) terms of public law, it is useful for those who believe that EU’s law and politics can be made legitimate (or simply intelligible) otherwise.Footnote ¹¹ Somek and Paar then make a bold claim:

Now one must be excused to recall similar debates on the European constitution (or democracy), where for some people it was enough to adopt a document bearing the name ‘constitution’ to declare that Europe has one,Footnote ¹³ or, to refer to Article 10 TEU and say that the EU is capable of becoming democracy (and even serve as a model for other international organisations).Footnote ¹⁴ There has always been an important voice explaining that these terms demand more than legal declarations: Alexander Somek.Footnote ¹⁵

It is therefore surprising to see the same author making such simplistic argument: because there is a word ‘society’ mentioned in Article 2 TEU, then Europe is a society. And, even more consequentially, to infer from this ‘finding’ that ‘it makes sense to view it [the society] as encompassed by a public sphere’.Footnote ¹⁶ Now, it is of course possible to say both things, as all depends on how we understand the key terms. However, saying that the EU actually has a kind of ‘constitution’, and can be thought through as ‘democratic’, is usually possible only by simplifying such terms (or stripping them of important context, in which they usually appear). The same applies to the concepts of ‘society’ and ‘public sphere’, which are embedded in rich philosophical debates dating back several decades (and still alive and ongoing).

In this Reply I will focus on the concept of ‘public sphere’ and will leave ‘society’ for some other occasion, although Arendt might have been surprised to see The Human Condition invoked in pieces that seek to elevate the concept of society to be the new collective singular of a supposedly political community.Footnote ¹⁷ It is the conception of public sphere that raises questions that relate most directly to the role of scholars and their public engagement on the internet (and elsewhere). It is therefore this concept with which I begin my reply (Sections 3 and 4), to turn later to scholactivism (Sections 5–7).

3. ‘Blawgosphere’ and Twitter creating a meaningful public sphere?

It is usually Jürgen Habermas and The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Footnote ¹⁸ (and not Hanah Arendt and The Human Condition)Footnote ¹⁹ that provides the starting point for any discussion of the public sphere in political or social theory. However, as I will show, it is also transformation with the small ‘t’ which has miraculously escaped Somek and Paar’s attention. And it is indeed Habermas (and the whole theoretical approach to public sphere that builds on his ground-breaking work), not Arendt,Footnote ²⁰ who provides analytical tools to understand this transformation.Footnote ²¹

In Habermas’s own words, until his book was published in Germany in 1962, ‘the notion of public sphere was used in a rather unspecific sense, primarily within the conceptual field of “public opinion”’.Footnote ²² Habermas instead put emphasis on ‘the function of the public sphere in ensuring the sustainability of the democratic political community’,Footnote ²³ and this has been studied and critically assessed in political and social theory ever since. Public sphere in Habermas’s understanding mediates concerns emerging from the ‘life-world’ to other functional spheres, primarily politics, and thus contributes to social and political integration of citizens. It is the backbone of deliberative democracy, as Habermas came to conceptualise it in his later work.Footnote ²⁴ To do this, however, public sphere must fulfil certain conditions: a common language or even ‘common world’ (as Arendt had it) will not be sufficient (and for some even necessary) qualities of the public sphere capable of legitimating democratic polity and its institutions.Footnote ²⁵

It has been a contested topic for decades now, how the public sphere should be shaped so that it serves the legitimating function. One of the most influential contributions (and critiques of Habermas’s original work) came from Nancy Fraser shortly after The Structural Transformation was published in English.Footnote ²⁶ Fraser attacked Habermas’s gendered, or as she put it back then, the ‘bourgeois-masculinist’ ideology behind the notion of public sphere. Habermas saw it emerging in literary saloons of Western cities, where mostly wealthy men were allowed, while their households had been taken care of by their wives – something that Habermas was oblivious to in his Transformation. Such exclusion (or exclusivity) was not a problem of participation only, but representation (and representativeness) too. Certain topics simply could not become a matter of public debate.

A first observation one can make about Somek and Paar’s optimism regarding the digital public sphere is that also blogging (and the online presence) has a significant gender dimension.Footnote ²⁷ Fraser was however also critical of some other assumptions made by Habermas, perhaps even more relevant for our reflections on Somek’s and Peer’s piece: one such assumption concerned the apparent need for the unity of public sphere, whereas especially the critical theory stressed the need for ‘counterpublics’Footnote ²⁸ that would include voices and perspective not accounted for in the hegemonic public sphere. Fraser explains:

In the context of the rather hegemonic discourse on the Verfassungsblog these could be voices not only challenging the liberal variant of constitutionalism (which has increasingly become à la mode), but those advocating quite openly illiberalism, right-wing conservatism or nationalism. Fraser adds:

Now, one should perhaps not expect this to happen on one medium: Verfassungsblog, which is quite open about its ideological orientation. However, scholars reflecting on the nature of the public sphere in ‘Europe’s political constitution’ should take some distance from that particular blog and not to celebrate it as the place where the ‘talk of European constitutional law eventually become a matter of course’.Footnote ³¹ If we truly want to take it seriously as a platform of the emerging public sphere, more needs to be said on its functioning – and whether it can really be conceived of as a public sphere in some relevant sense. Reliance on Arendt does not do this, and if the analytical tools developed in the context of the Habermasian theory are applied, lots of questions emerge and cry for answering.Footnote ³²

Finally, it is also important to stress that as a medium between society and politics, public sphere does include communication among and within formal institutions (such as the ‘judicial dialogue’ among Europe’s highest courts or parliamentary debates in national assemblies or the European Parliament). They belong to the ‘system’ and are structurally different from the public sphere emerging from the life-world.

I do understand that since Somek and Paar did not base their conceptualization of the public sphere on Habermas, they do not need to be concerned with such distinctions. If not, however, then it is not very clear what exactly the concept of public sphere conceived in Arendtinian terms does for Europe’s political constitution – apart from providing a certain ‘confirmation bias’, as the contributors to the Verfassungsblog engage ‘in the advocacy of constitutionalism (and do not publish diatribes ‘against constitutionalism’.Footnote ³³ The world may appear comfortably ‘common’ – to those who are allowed to the debate (or willing to participate in it under its rules). The rest is ‘left behind’ (pun intended).

4. Digital transformation and its relevance for Europe’s political constitution

In this section I want to move from critiquing Somek and Paar’s failure to explore the normative dimension of the public sphere (my suggestion that they should have read Habermas, not Arendt, so to speak). Here I want to explain what makes Habermasian analysis relevant at the time of another transformation, this time in our digital age. This is why transformation with a small ‘t’ is important too. What I am going to say then applies more to other forms of digital communication than blogs, especially to X (formerly Twitter), which Paar and Somek take as another example of how academics engage in the public sphere of Europe’s constitution.Footnote ³⁴

First, however, something needs to be said on Paar and Somek’s observation that ‘in legal scholarship in general, blogs are becoming increasingly popular’,Footnote ³⁵ suggesting that it still is a relatively recent phenomenon (and that we can only start exploring what it means for us, scholars. The question of course is what it means ‘becoming increasingly popular’ and when something already is, or even was popular. Neither Paar and Somek, nor do I have empirical data on how many professors abandoned blogs for X, as I suggested rather causally in my ‘Freedom and Power’ piece.Footnote ³⁶ However, as someone who used to be very active in the blogosphere not so recently ago,Footnote ³⁷ I did observe few important changes in the mode of blogging since 2006 (when, as Paar and Somek noticed, ‘US legal scholars already discussed how legal blogs might transform legal scholarship’.Footnote ³⁸

First, compared to the heydays of blogging (which led to the symposia reflecting on that issue), today there is very few blogs by individual professors, or at least run at platforms that allow for almost complete control of their contents (and visuality) by the blogging professor. For the very few examples of such blogs from the early days, one can take a look at the Yale Law School’s Jack Balkin’s Balkinization,Footnote ³⁹ or University of Chicago Brian Leier’s Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog.Footnote ⁴⁰ Compared to these, Verfassungsblog (or EU law live,Footnote ⁴¹ for that matter), are much closer to professional media,Footnote ⁴² not providing direct access to professors (and their control over the content) of their writing. For such seemingly unconstrained mode of communication,Footnote ⁴³ in which they used to engage on their personal blogs, professors now use X (and increasingly, Bluesky).

Secondly, apart from the Verfassungsblog, online companions to traditional scholarly journals should be distinguished from the old-time blawgs. The US law reviews paved the way for outlets that Europeans are familiar with, most importantly perhaps EJIL Talk! Blog of the European Journal of International Law.Footnote ⁴⁴ Contrary to the professional (or semi-professional) blogs mentioned above, they are closer to the traditional modes of scholarly communication, although they may also suffer from what one of the founders of the EJIL Talk! called ‘fast food culture’ of legal scholarship.Footnote ⁴⁵ They might be less interested in getting readers (or clicks) for their posts compared to the former kinds of blogs.

Now having clarified what sorts of platforms of communication we are taking about, we can move to the analysis in the light of the recent debate on the Transformation of Public Sphere. As the editors of a recent special issue devoted to this topic, Philipp Staab and Thorsten Thiel, observe, Habermas’s

Each of these three elements got transformed in the period that culminated in the second half of the 20^th century, when Habermas was writing his Transformation. The first, which Staab and Thiel call ‘mediality’, shifted from the late 19^th century’s literary criticism and print-media conflict over public opinion towards mass-media entertainment; the second, ‘subjectivity’ from bourgeois self-consciousness towards industrial class polarisation and late capitalist consumerism, and finally, the third element, ‘accumulation’, transformed from bourgeois entrepreneurship towards industrial monopoly capitalism.

The digital transformation brought changes (and new challenges) in each of these three dimensions. First, regarding mediality: most critical social or communication theorists focus on platforms, such as Twitter (and other social media, such as Facebook, Tik Tok or Instagram), as they present the most troubling concerns, expressed, for example, in the influential book by Shoshana Zuboff.Footnote ⁴⁷ Apart from the constant surveillance by platforms of its users (and turning the data thus mined about them into a commodity), they also structure the communication in particular ways to generate more traffic on their sites (eg, by suggesting interesting tweets to users based on their previous readings or Twitter accounts they follow) so that more data on user can be scrapped. Staab and Thiel argue that

There is no reason to think that scholars using Twitter (and other platforms) are less exploited than other users, and we should seriously question various policies introduced at universities that encourage scholars to use social media in order to ‘boost their research career’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Or does anybody believe Elon Musk, after all he did to Twitter (including renaming it to ‘X’), that he really wants his platform to be ‘the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated’?Footnote ⁵⁰

Second, concerning subjectivity, social media invite ‘singularisation’: the ‘pursuit of uniqueness and exceptionality, which has not only become a subjective desire but also a paradoxical social expectation’.Footnote ⁵¹ Here one may wonder whether the general analysis of social media applies to scholars using Twitter, as to me it rather promotes a kind of herd mentality that I criticised in my original article, especially as related to petitions authored and signed en masse by scholars.Footnote ⁵² However, it is also true that quite often X encourages publishing strong opinions that can attract readers, rather than analyses, which require time and effort. As Elisabeth Paar herself observed, the logic of the social media forces researchers to report on their research even before it has been actually done.Footnote ⁵³ And a good advice one may give to their PhD students is to get off from X for a while, if they ever want to finish their thesis.

Finally, accumulation, which relates to both other dimensions mentioned above: in the era of individualised consumption, what is valued most (and how digital platforms make their profit) is the access to consumers. Staab and Thiel then observe that ‘[t]his structure no longer distinguishes between citizens and consumers or between political public spheres and private worlds of consumption. The public sphere of social media is instead a market privatised by the respective platform providers’.Footnote ⁵⁴ In that respect one must praise the Verfassungsblog that despite its limitations (especially the blurred line between scholarship on the one hand, and journalism and political activism on the other), its structure does not support this phenomenon. However, I find it troubling to have universities encouraging their researchers to participate on such platforms rather than trying to find alternative ways. At the time when universities struggle to get their audiences and spend resources on creating attractive brands, it is perhaps not something to expect from them.Footnote ⁵⁵ But at least, one should ask whether this is the only world we now have to live in.

This leaves me to move to the other part of my reply to Somek and Paar, concerning their claim that ‘scholactivism is the form of constitutional law of Europe’ and that ‘[t]here is nothing below or above it. It is all there is’.Footnote ⁵⁶ As will become apparent, the answer to my question – is there not an alternative? – depends on what we actually do, as scholars and how we reflect on it.

5. Let Kelsen sleep: why we do not need ‘truth’ with a capital ‘T’ to pursue knowledge as scholars

Somek and Paar dismissed my critique of scholactivism, as it offered, in their words, ‘Kelsen without the intellectual rigor, Kelsen light, as it were’.Footnote ⁵⁷ It hurts to read that my critique lacks intellectual rigor (although the standard – Hans Kelsen – is set very high). Much worse, however, is that my argument was not understood properly. Let’s hope this time around I will do a better job.

Most importantly, Somek and Paar misleadingly claim that I believe that ‘[g]enuine scholarship is supposed to arrive at true descriptive statements of the law and not about doing good or improving the world’.Footnote ⁵⁸ It is true that I believe that it is not scholars’ concern to be ‘doing good or improving the world’, at least not a primary one. However, I have never said that genuine scholarship ‘is supposed to arrive at true descriptive statements of the law’. I think it was Somek and Paar’s desire to see me as ‘Kelsen light’ that led them to ascribe me this view:

I cannot deny that thanks to Somek and Paar’s provocation, I did become more ‘learned’ – as they ask me to beFootnote ⁶⁰ - and know the Weimar Methodenstreit, from which Kelsen’s critique of politicized legal scholarship emerged, much better that I had before, when writing the original article.Footnote ⁶¹ However, I still do not see how (much) Kelsen can enlighten us today. His views on what can ‘make the practice of legal scholarship [to] live up to the level of a science’ are clearly outdated and not the ones I would find particularly helpful today, almost one hundred years after he published them. When Kelsen defends the ‘formalism’ of his theory, he quotes neo-Kantian German philosopher Hermann Cohen: ‘Only the formal is objective; the more formal a methodology, the more objective it can become. And the more objectively a problem is formulated in all the depths of the issue, the more formally it must be grounded’.Footnote ⁶² Based on this view Kelsen claims, quite forcefully, that ‘Those who do not understand this do not know what is essential to scientific knowledge’.Footnote ⁶³ One can find more statements of such nature in Kelsen’s writings – and especially Kelsen’s belief in the non-ideological character of his own theory is rather self-defeating.Footnote ⁶⁴

My reliance on Fish (and his pragmatic, anti-foundationalist approach) then makes perfect sense, since I do not endorse Kelsen’s views on the foundations of knowledge. It can be due to the lack of intellectual rigor on my part, but I simply find Fish much more persuasive than Kelsen – as I further explain below in the concluding section.

There is one more element which makes Kelsen rather unhelpful for my argument against scholactivism, unless one takes him as a cautionary tale: his belief that legal scholarship dealing with law and state can be separated – and make the ‘true’ scholarship immune from ideology and politics: ‘Doing scholarship does not force us to abandon all political judgment; it merely obligates us to separate the one from the other, cognition from volition’.Footnote ⁶⁵ He concludes his essay thus: ‘If there is any point at all upon which one can stand outside the arena of power, then it is science and scholarship. Even the science of power; which is then a pure theory of state and law’.Footnote ⁶⁶

I hope it is clear from my article that I am concerned with the very opposite: that constitutional scholars, no matter how much they would want it, can never stay outside the realm of power and politics. This is how I introduced my article:

It can be an interesting question whether constitutional scholars can ever escape what Kaarlo Tuori described as ‘imposed normativity’ of legal scholarship – that whatever they say will have implications for what the law ‘is’.Footnote ⁶⁸ The only way for their pronouncements to not have consequences outside the realm of scholarship would be to do ‘pure’ theory.Footnote ⁶⁹ This is something on what I actually agree with Kelsen – and also Somek and Paar, who observe:

(Pure) theory of constitutional law – if such discipline is even possible, is of course not what constitutional scholars do today (and have ever been doing). And we need an account that helps us better than either Kelsen’s implausible view of science or Somek and Paar’s ‘everything goes’.

There is another way how to separate ‘useful legal advocacy’ (which still may in certain contexts be appropriate for legal academics to engage in), scholactivism (which I consider to be in wrong most, albeit not all, instances) and a reflexive scholarly analysis of various kinds – what I consider to be the realm of proper legal scholarship and the core of what legal scholars should be doing. And it is Fish (and philosophical pragmatism), not Kelsen (and his neo-Kantianism), that can help us see the difference.

6. What is it, then, to pursue legal scholarship?

As I do not endorse Kelsen’s views on legal science, I can fully agree with Somek and Paar when they say that ‘[t]he “pursuit of knowledge” is merely one practice (or “language game”) among others’Footnote ⁷¹ and that ‘there is nothing about this practice that would guarantee its ability to unveil truth with a capital T’.Footnote ⁷² The key is that I do not believe that we, scholars, need ‘truth with a capital T’ to be able to produce scientific (or as I would prefer calling it), scholarly knowledge.

I hope my explanation of this will not go too far if I say that what we seek is ‘scholarly truth’, which is a ‘truth’ established in our system and according to our protocols that pursue this goal as much as for example judicial process is concerned with establishing ‘truth’ that would enable the court to take a decision (one may complicate things further and say that the legal truth must enable the court to make a ‘just’ decision).Footnote ⁷³ Our goal, as scholars, is to expand our understanding of the law, not to pursue justice (or the rule of law or any other value one can imagine as falling into the ideology of constitutionalism). That is, in my view, what distinguishes us from legal practitioners or politicians.Footnote ⁷⁴ The rules of our work – our professional practices - should be geared towards this goal.

Our scholarly ‘truth’ – our understanding – does not need to be absolute so much as the ‘truth’ established by courts does not need to. Anybody who ever studied courts and judicial process knows that ‘judges are liars’Footnote ⁷⁵ and that legal truth is just that: legal truth, often based on fictions.Footnote ⁷⁶ And because of the existence of the rules of procedure advocates appealing the original decision can challenge such truth and higher courts – so long as the rules of appeal allow them – can change it. No truth with capital T needs to exist in order to make this social practice possible – and valuable.

The rules and procedures for establishing scholarly ‘truth’ are not as codified and binding as the rules of judicial process and are therefore open to contestation and change by the very actors who are supposed to be bound by them. But that only calls for more reflection (and possibly restraint) on the part of scholars. These rules include peer review, the existence of scholarly journals concerned with the pursuit of knowledge (and not with expanding their readership so that they are economically viable) etc.Footnote ⁷⁷ It would require much longer text than this Reply to deal with them in necessary detail – and critically.

7. Contingency, irony, and scholarship

I reject Somek and Paar’s contention that ‘[t]he only objection that can be made from this angle – the angle of Fish’s rejection of foundationalism – is that those [legal scholars] who pursue political aims are playing a different game and are therefore cheating about what they are really up to’.Footnote ⁷⁸ As any game, also the pursuit of scholarly knowledge has its rules and therefore it is not true that ‘nothing can be said, from Fish’s perspective, against playing at the game one plays’.Footnote ⁷⁹ To understand this, one needs to better appreciate what Fish was after: he was primarily against those who claimed to have access to some undeniably objective position, or to have found some ‘true’ ‘foundations’ of human knowledge.Footnote ⁸⁰

As a pragmatist, he did not claim that no rules exist: the difference he has had with lots of (legal) philosophers consisted in his understanding of the nature of such rules. It follows from the situatedness of (legal) actors, their education, socialisation in and exposure to practice. In other words, they are determined by the “community of interpreters”.Footnote ⁸¹ This notion is notoriously elusive and does not allow, according to some critics, discerning various relations of power inside and between such communities.Footnote ⁸² However, it is enough at this point to refer to it as an argument why no foundational principle (be it truth with capital T or ‘scientific objectivity’) needs to exist so that scholarly pursuit of knowledge can occur and its rules be formulated (and reformulated) by the very participants in the ‘game’, who can criticize other for violating them.Footnote ⁸³

Whatever I say, either here or in my other articles engaging with this topic,Footnote ⁸⁴ is therefore how I see these rules as a member of such community without believing in their undeniable foundations. To the contrary, I am aware of their contingency, which is the reason why I care. Perhaps, I am an ironist:

This irony however does not make me a cynic: to the contrary, I believe it is important not to give up the achievements of the past to the contingencies of the present, be it the rise of neoliberal university with all its demands on academics to have immediate impact, or the advent of the digital public sphere, which can make the old ways of scholarly communication appear outdated if not even inappropriate.

Pragmatism and especially the awareness of contingency also excludes ‘performative contradiction’ of which Somek and Paar accuse those who want to engage in scholarship and stay outside politics at the same time. In their view, ‘[o]ne cannot make normative statements and sit still if one has opportunities to help to give effect to the stated normative views. This would amount to a performative contradiction’.Footnote ⁸⁶ There is nothing in the pursuit of scholarly knowledge that forces academics to use all opportunities to promote their preferred normative (and political) positions. To the contrary, as scholars they always need to consider whether what they do promotes understanding (and reflexivity – which can mean, yes, to ‘sit still’ – and away from Twitter), or whether it is legal advocacy or politics – something to be left to others in most instances.