Constitutions are commonly regarded as uniquely national products, shaped by domestic ideals and politics. This paper develops and empirically tests a novel hypothesis, which is that constitutions are also shaped by transnational influence, or “diffusion.” Constitutional rights can diffuse through four mechanisms: coercion, competition, learning and acculturation. To test diffusion in the constitutional realm, we traced the historical documents of all post-WWII constitutions and documented the presence of 108 constitutional rights. Using a sample of these rights in 180 countries between 1948 and 2001, we estimate a spatial lag model to explain their adoption. Our results show that countries follow the choices of their former colonizer, countries with the same legal origin, the same religion, the same former colonizer, and the same aid donor. These transnational influences are strongest when a nation adopts its first constitution. At this time, no less than 46 percent of the variation in a bill of rights results from transnational influences.
For the over half-million people currently homeless in the United States, the U.S. Constitution has historically provided little help: it is strongly...
Gradualism should have won out in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, exerting gravitational influence on the majority and dissenters alike. In general...
Today, legal culture is shaped by One Big Question: should courts, particularly the US Supreme Court, have a lot of power? This question is affecting...
Constitutional review is the power of a body, usually a court, to assess whether law or government action complies with the constitution. Originating...
During times of crisis, governments often consider policies that may promote safety, but that would require overstepping constitutionally protected...
The United States has granted reparations for a variety of historical injustices, from imprisonment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War...
Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like...
This Article develops a new way of understanding the law in order to address contemporary debates about judicial practice and reform. The...
In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, Justice Thomas’s majority opinion announced that the key to applying originalist methodology...
In Poland, Venezuela, Rwanda, and several other countries, governments have in the past years altered basic rules of their constitutional system to...
In Chile, many commentators, academics and political leaders have spent years arguing that the limited nature of the social rights in the national...
At first blush, the debate between Stanley Fish and Ronald Dworkin that took place over the course of the 1980s and early 90s seems to have produced...
In our increasingly polarized society, claims that prosecutions are politically motivated, racially motivated, or just plain arbitrary are more common...
When federal judges are called on to adjudicate separation-of-powers disputes, they are not mere arbiters of the separation of powers. By resolving a...
Gender equality matters in the global public law academy for at least three reasons: the production of diverse scholarship, and substantive equality...
Ethnographic approaches are not as widely practiced among constitutional scholars as they probably should be. Some may harbor perfectly reasonable...