The Evolution and Ideology of Global Constitutionalism

Abstract

It has become almost universal practice for countries to adopt formal constitutions. Little is known empirically, however, about the evolution of this practice on a global scale. Are constitutions unique and defining statements of national aspiration and identity? Or are they standardized documents that vary only at the margins, in predictable and patterned ways? Are constitutions becoming increasingly similar or dissimilar over time, or is there no discernible overall pattern to their development? Until very recently, scholars have lacked even basic empirical data on the content of the world's

Punishment's Legal Templates: A Theory of Formal Penal Change

“…In the criminal law, we can analyze penal codes, the distinction between first-and second-degree murder, repeatoffender laws, namesake laws, sentencing guidelines, and crime victims' bills of rights as templates. More broadly, some of the most significant legal phenomena-jury trials (Hans 2017), alternative dispute resolution (Edelman and Suchman 1999), EEO/AA policies (Edelman 1992), problem-solving courts (Mirchandani 2005), constitutions (Law and Versteeg 2011), the Cravath model for law firms (Nelson 1981), and mega law firms (Liu and Wu 2016)-are themselves templates that diffuse, institutionalize, and shape conceptions of the law, its institutions, and its practices, even while functioning differently than anticipated in practice. Indeed, thinking of legal templates-like alternative dispute resolution or EEO/AA policies-as formal structures loosely coupled to actual practice and recognizing their constitutive power is already well established within law and organizations studies (Edelman 1992(Edelman , 2016.…”

Avoiding Obligation

“…Yet summing these provisions would require the strong assumption that each provision is equally informative about domestic legal protection, which may not be the case. All of the civil liberty provisions shown in Table 1 (the freedoms of religion, expression, assembly, and association), for example, are present in a vast majority of the world's constitutions (Law and Versteeg 2011) and so are probably not very informative about how extensive formal legal protection is in one country relative to another. A sounder alternative to a summary indicator would be to construct a measure of the latent concept that these provisions are related to, that is, one could treat the provisions listed previously as functions of some unobserved characteristic of a country's legal system (de jure protection of civil/political/personal integrity rights) and derive estimates of the level of formal protection provided based on the presence/absence of such provisions.…”

The Administrative Foundation of the Rule of Law

“…The fact that most countries-including authoritarian states-have signed various international human rights treaties and conventions (Simmons 2009) and also have written constitutions containing bills of rights (Law and Versteeg 2011) indicates the normative force of human rights. In other words, ' represents a legal limit on the exercise of government power so that not everything the government does is legal: only policies p # ' are legal while policies p . '…”