Methodenwoche of the GGG

lecturer: Prof. Dr. Ran Hirschl, Göttingen, Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Comparative Constitutionalism)
target group: doctoral students in public law, political science, sociology, institutional economics and closely related fields
language: English

course description:
This workshop offers an examination of the various purposes, research designs, and methodologies of inquiry in the rapidly expanding field of comparative public law in general, and comparative constitutionalism in particular. Among the topics covered are: the comparative aspect in comparative legal inquiry; studying public law beyond examination of rules and rulings, and the foundations of legal vs. social science research methods in this area; effective research design, case selection and data analysis principles; and the challenge and promise of collaborative and interdisciplinary scholarship. The workshop is suitable for doctoral students in public law, political science, sociology, institutional economics and closely related fields. Throughout the workshop, examples will be drawn from the study of constitutionalism across time and place, as it has emerged as one of the most exciting areas in contemporary legal and social science scholarship on public law, as well as an important aspect of jurisprudence, political struggle and state building worldwide.

course requirements (2 credits):
(i) keen interest in comparative study of law and legal institutions, their origins and consequences; (ii) active participation in daily workshop discussions; (iii) 10 pp. reflection paper (due 1 Sept. 2018) on the logic, advantages and potential weaknesses of the research design, case selection, data collection/analysis and overall methodological matrix deployed in the participant’s own research project.

reading:

  • Christopher McCrudden, “Legal Research and the Social Sciences,” The Law Quarterly Review 122 (2006): 632-650.
  • Mathias Reimann, “Comparative Law and Neighboring Disciplines,” in Mauro Bussani and Ugo Mattei (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Comparative Law (Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 13-34.
  • Mark van Hoecke, “Methodology of Comparative Legal Research,” Law & Method 3 (2015): 1-35.
  • Mark Tushnet, “The Possibilities of Comparative Constitutional Law,” 108 (1999): 1225–1309.
  • Jaakko Husa, “Comparison”, in David Law and Malcolm Langford, eds., Research Methods in Constitutional Law: A Handbook (Edward Elgar, forthcoming in 2019) [Available through SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3174643].
  • Vicki Jackson, “Comparative Constitutional Law: Methodologies,” in Michel Rosenfeld and András Sajó, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Law (Oxford University Press, 2012), 54-74.
  • Ran Hirschl, “How Universal is Comparative Constitutional Law?” in Ran Hirschl, Comparative Matters: The Renaissance of Comparative Constitutional Law (Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 192-223.
  • Tom Ginsburg, “Studying Japanese Law Because It’s There,” American Journal of Comparative Law 58 (2010): 15–25.
  • Kim Lane Scheppele, “Constitutional Ethnography: An Introduction,” Law & Society Review 38 (2004): 389–406.
  • Ran Hirschl, “The Question of Case Selection in Comparative Constitutional Law,” American Journal of Comparative Law 53 (2005): 125–155.
  • Moshe Cohen-Eliya and Iddo Porat, “Introduction,” in Moshe Cohen-Eliya and Iddo Porat, Proportionality and Constitutional Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 1-9.
  • Mark Graber, “Institutionalism as Conclusion and Approach,” in David Law and Malcolm Langford, eds., Research Methods in Constitutional Law: A Handbook (Edward Elgar, forthcoming in 2019) [Available through SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=3157358].
  • Rachel Ellet, “In Defense of Interviews,” in Diana Kapiszewski and Matthew Ingram, Concepts, Data & Method in Comparative Law and Politics (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming in 2019).
  • Anne Meuwese and Mila Versteeg, “Quantitative Methods for Comparative Constitutional Law,” in Maurice Adams & Jacco Bomhoff, eds., Practice and Theory in Comparative Law (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 230-256.
  • Holger Spamann, “Empirical Comparative Law,” Annual Review of Law & Social Science 11 (2015): 131-153.
  • Adam Chilton and Mila Versteeg, “Do Constitutional Rights Make a Difference,” American Journal of Political Science 60 (2016): 575-589.
  • Tom Ginsburg and Mila Versteeg, “Why Do Countries Adopt Constitutional Review?” Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 30 (2014): 587-622.
  • Tom Ginsburg and James Melton, “Does the constitutional amendment rule matter at all?: Amendment cultures and the challenges of measuring amendment difficulty,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 13 (2015): 686–713.
  • Gretchen Helmke, “The Logic of Strategic Defection: Court–Executive Relations in Argentina Under Dictatorship and Democracy,” American Political Science Review 96 (2002): 291-303.
  • David Law, “The Global Language of Human Rights: A Computational Linguistic Analysis,” Law & Ethics of Human Rights 12 (forthcoming in 2018) [Available through SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3049625].