Bibliographic record
Abstract
Today law leads all disciplines in the study of comparative constitutional amendment. In its early stages, however, comparative constitutional amendment was almost exclusively the domain of political science. Why was law late to the field, and what explains its primacy in the present day? In this chapter prepared for a volume on “Disciplinary Divides in Public Law,” I sketch a brief intellectual history of the field of comparative constitutional amendment with an overview of the three waves of scholarly inquiry—descriptive, empirical, and purposive—that have defined the field since its beginnings. I show that political scientists created the field with their rich descriptive analyses of amendment rules in the constitutions of the world. Lawyers had little interest in this line of inquiry. Political scientists moreover initiated the second wave in the field with novel empirical studies of the flexibility and rigidity of constitutional amendment rules. As in the first wave, lawyers showed little interest in this second wave. I moreover show that law was eventually drawn to the field only when courts became significant actors in the making and amending of constitutions—a seismic development in constitutional practice that occurred during what became the third wave in the study of comparative constitutional amendment. Law has since driven scholarly inquiry in the field. But as the field now enters an emergent fourth wave of scholarly inquiry, law and political science will have to blend their complementary disciplinary advantages if ever we hope to make progress in defending democracy from attacks from within.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.061 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.016 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.026 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".