Logic for lawyers? You either love it or hate it. However, we are convinced that when Weronika Węgorzewska from our team teaches it, the whole group will love it!

We are keeping our fingers crossed for the whole new semester – your first as a lecturer!

We are very pleased to share that our team member, Mikołaj Pietrzyk, recently took part in a conference mini-marathon.

At the same week, he attended two conferences – in Karpacz and Split, where he delivered presentations on political dimensions of theories of legal interpretation. Congratulations!

European Law Unbound Society held recently its annual conference in Prague – and prof. @mauroarturo.bsky.social was there with an interesting paper! He delivered a speech about informal institutions in judicial decision-making but in a methodological way that utilized interviews.

And our Team is complete!

Dr. Vahid Taghvaee joins the Zugzwang team. Holding a PhD in economics, he joins the University of Silesia in Katowice. We are sure that Dr. Taghvaee’s expertise will be crucial for the team to dive deep into the empirical part of the project!

Welcome to the team!

We are well aware of the phenomenon known as court packing. But have you ever thought about court unpacking? If not, make sure to reach out to @mauroarturo.bsky.social, who has just given a presentation on this topic at the annual conference of the European Consortium for Political Research!

📍Project Update

We are pleased to share that our PI, @mauroarturo.bsky.social, presented the paper "Constitutional Zugzwang: A Methodological Proposal Toward an Empirical Understanding of the Impact of Hyper-Amendments" at the Annual Conference of the International Society of Public Law (ICON•S).

Big congratulations to Mikołaj Wolanin, our scholarship recipient, on obtaining the Master's degree in canon law at UKSW in Warsaw

This shows how broad the horizons of our team members are!

♟️ Zugzwang in practice – not only constitutional! ♟️

We are happy to announce that one of our research team members has just won a chess tournament organised by a local rum bar in Bielsko-Biała! 🏆

Congratulations on your victory!

It’s sent! PI @mauroarturo.bsky.social & Alfonso Herrera submitted the 🇲🇽 2024 Report for the Global Review of Constitutional Law. It covers this year's regressive amendments & judicial overhaul. Qualitative insights to enrich our empirical work. Coming OA soon! 📘⚖️

Meet our team member!

Mikołaj Pietrzyk is a young legal scholar and researcher specializing in statutory interpretation, legal theory, and the institutional role of courts. He is currently a doctoral student at the University of Silesia in Katowice and an amateur chess player.

Mikołaj Wolanin – student at University of Warsaw and UKSW in Warsaw, author of 17 peer-reviewed publications, speaker at more than 35 scientific conferences, including international ones. President of the Foundation for the Student Rights, TOP10 of the 2024 Global Student Prize.

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photo: RBF

Weronika Węgorzewska is a doctoral candidate at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków and a law graduate from the University of Warsaw. Her academic interests focus on legal theory, particularly issues at the intersection of legal logic and legislative theory, as well as Spanish law and language.

Meet our team!

@mauroarturo.bsky.social (Principal Investigator) is a comparative constitutional scholar with degrees from Mexico (Bachelor's), Spain (Master's and PhD), and Poland (habilitation). He researches constitutional courts and constitutional amendments with an interdisciplinary approach

Constitutions are characteristic for their stability and often rigidity. India, Brazil or Mexico, however, contradict this, amending their constitutions several times per year. Can the Zugzwang notion have explanatory power over their amendment dynamic? Follow us to find out!

What is a Zugzwang? It is a situation in chess where a player has no option but to make a move that worsens the position. Can countries that frequently and rapidly change their constitutions be under similar dynamics? This is what we want to find out through our project!

The @ncn.gov.pl-funded project “Constitutional Zugzwang: Towards an amendment theory on constitutional momentum” is getting started! But what is a Zugzwang itself? That's what we'll tell you about soon. For now, we welcome you to our profile and encourage you to follow it!