German Law Journal 1639 prism of constitutional citizenship, understood as the space where constitutions and citizenship intersect.24 As with analysis of the pandemic, our understanding of constitutional citizenship emerges most clearly from synergistic analysis which places legal norms, such as the constitutionally determined equality of citizens, alongside other norms and principles that govern the core aspects of human and political sociality that citizenship embodies. The benefit of such an approach is that it allows us to exploit the uneasy relationships between citizenship, (in)equality, and in/exclusion in ways that can shed new light on how the pandemic has come to have such serious impacts upon certain communities and groups, especially those that are vulnerable. Furthermore, this mode of analysis may even suggest pathways towards fresh legal and political contestations of the weary inevitability that somehow a pandemic such as COVID-19 is bound to have the most negative effects for those who already live in challenging circumstances and that in the face of such a crisis nothing will change. The next section of the article elaborates further upon the basic idea of constitutional citizenship before subsequent sections explore a variety of domains in which we can see an impact of the pandemic on aspects of constitutional citizenship. This analysis makes no claim to completeness, and provides, at this stage, only preliminary reflections. The reflections are organized under the following headings: citizenship as legal status; pandemic (im)mobilities; intrusions in private life; the side-lining of political citizenship; and the challenge of protecting the vulnerable during a pandemic. The analysis highlights that while some impact upon citizenship status and rights might be thought inevitable in a pandemic, it is the extent to which such impacts can be exacerbated by existing vulnerabilities or inequalities which is the most important feature to emphasize. As already hinted, the article juggles the paradox that citizenship can be both object of study and analytical tool. Indeed, as will be shown, the conceptual lenses of constitutional citizenship provide a powerful framing to analyze the disparate impacts of the pandemic in a way that offers both diagnosis of areas of concern and new ways of challenging the status quo. B. Values, Principles, and Constitutional Citizenship The type of equal citizenship trumpeted in many constitutions across the world is just as elusive as the idea of an equal opportunity pandemic. Formal constitutional law in many countries asserts the equality of citizens, often alongside the imperative of avoiding statelessness. This may be found in the texts of constitutions themselves and in principles found elsewhere within constitutional law, many of which have been interpreted and upheld by courts with constitutional mandates.25 Such texts may promise equal citizenship for all, but the reality, once context is brought back in, is that citizenship is often experienced unequally. This point applies across citizenship’s many dimensions: as regards issues of legal status or “access,” often termed “nationality”; as regards the bundle of rights and duties that are sometimes conflated with the membership principle itself; and as regards the political, identarian, and symbolic aspects of citizenship and its capacity to define who “we” are and how we can act responsibly towards each other and towards the institutions that shape our common existence. In sum, “full membership” may be inaccessible for many, both for reasons of socio-economic exclusion and because of the inaccessibility of public spaces for political participation. Inequality has long been a pervasive condition of citizenship and of citizens both within and across states,26 but it has perhaps become even more visible in recent years, in tandem with a noticeable rise in political movements of nationalism, populism, and often authoritarianism, 24 JO SHAW, THE PEOPLE IN QUESTION: CITIZENS AND CONSTITUTIONS IN UNCERTAIN TIMES (Bristol Univ. Press 2020). Jo Shaw, Introduction to the GLOBALCIT symposium, (2021), https://globalcit.eu/globalcit-review-symposium-of-thepeople-in-question-citizens-and-constitutions-in-uncertain-times-jo-shaw. 25 JO SHAW, THE PEOPLE IN QUESTION: CITIZENS AND CONSTITUTIONS IN UNCERTAIN TIMES 77–87, n.22 (Bristol Univ. Press 2020). 26 AYELET SHACHAR, THE BIRTHRIGHT LOTTERY: CITIZENSHIP AND GLOBAL INEQUALITY (Harvard Univ. Press 2009). https://doi.org/10.1017/glj.2021.77 Published online by Cambridge University Press