This panel surveys a variety of research methods in constitutional law, both old and new, from multiple disciplines. The papers on this panel will appear in Research Methods in Constitutional Law: A Handbook (Edward Elgar, forthcoming 2019).
Constitutional Law and Economics
This chapter addresses a new and fertile research program: constitutional law and economics. Constitutional law and economics asks questions like, ‘What is the extent of the U.S. Congress‘s power to regulate commerce?‘; ‘How much legislative authority can be delegated to administrators?‘; and ‘When should constitutional change happen through judicial updating rather than formal amendment?‘ To...
Institutionalist Approaches to the Study of Constitutional Law
A fair case can be made that the vast majority of research in public law takes an institutional approach and that most public law scholars are institutionalists. With the exception of judicial biography, research in public law is almost always about whether some legal or institution matters. We study the influence of different ways of...
Mixed Methods in Constitutional Law: A Question-Driven Approach
Recent decades have witnessed an explosion of interest in multimethod research. It is partly a by-product of the rise of inter-disciplinarity but it is also a result of intra-disciplinarydevelopments, such as the demise of methodological ‘paradigm wars‘ and the rise of computational approaches. Sited at the edge of law and politics, with material and symbolic...
Quantitative Approaches to the Study of Constitutional Drafting
This paper surveys and critically discusses the relatively new and rapidly growing subfield of quantitative scholarship on constitutions, with particular attention to the challenges involved in addressing the question of whether and in what ways formal constitutions actually matter in the real world.