Farewell, Verfassungsblog
Today marks the end of my time as academic coordinator of the research project “Verfassungsblog: Perspectives of scientific communication in legal scholarship”, and of my tenure as contributing editor of Verfassungsblog.
Sometimes in life, time has come for a change, and my transition from the Wissenschaftskolleg to the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law marks such a point of change.
Until the end of this academic year, I will remain affiliated with the research project Verfassungsblog as lecturer at Humboldt University’s Faculty of Law, co-teaching the VerfassungsblogSeminar with Max Steinbeis, and, Deo volente, co-convene a thrilling pluri-medial, international and interdisciplinary VerfassungsblogDebate next winter. And I will of course, with co-editors Christoph Möllers and Maximilian Steinbeis, put a final editorial polish on the forthcoming two volumes with selected Verfassungsblog contributions (being published with Nomos in the Recht im Kontext series). But my shoulders are relieved from the administrative burdens, and fortunately so. After all, reading, writing, thinking, and the exchange and sharing of ideas are closer to my heart and mind as naked calculations – sometimes a nerve-wrecking task in the volatile financial realities of academia. And yet: my own pleasure when sometimes indulging in the art of administration (l’art d’administration) never ceased to surprise me these last years.
Indeed, it has been a pleasure and a privilege to set the Verfassungsblog’s cooperation with the Wissenschaftskolleg on track, to develop a concept for embedding the blog into the landscapes of a German university, to have a hand in planting the research project into Humboldt’s Faculty of Law and to help facilitating the thriving and flourishing of Max Steinbeis’ wonderful Verfassungsblog, the emergence of a network of European constitutional law blogs – and maybe even the rapprochement of academia and wider public spheres, and to fresh reflections on formats and publication strategies in legal scholarship.
Participation in the Verfassungsblog experiment carries, as does any text (even a good blogpost), countless unwritten footnotes – invisible references, referring to coincidences and coups de chance, detours and path-dependencies, and pointing to those whose support, cooperation, trust and commitment has been crucial at important points, even (and in particular) as they remain invisible. I remain grateful to them all.
May Verfassungsblog and the research project live, grow and flourish!
I am sure: We will read each other again.