Book edited by Hanna Lerner and David Landau: “In a seminal article more than two decades ago, Jon Elster lamented that despite the large volume of scholarship in related fields, such as comparative constitutional law and constitutional design, there was a severe dearth of work on the process and context of constitution making. Happily, his point no longer holds. Recent years have witnessed a near-explosion of high-quality work on constitution-making processes, across a range of fields including law, political science, and history. This volume attempts to synthesize and expand upon this literature. It offers a number of different perspectives and methodologies aimed at understanding the contexts in which constitution making takes place, its motivations, the theories and processes that guide it, and its effects. The goal of the contributors is not simply to explain the existing state of the field, but also to provide new research on these key questions.
Our aims in this introduction are relatively modest. First, we seek to set up some of the major questions treated by recent research in order to explain how the chapters in this volume contribute to them. We do not aim to give a complete state of the field, but we do lay out what we see as several of the biggest challenges and questions posed by recent scholarship. …(More)”.