Ginsburg Discusses New Book at NYU

Tom Ginsburg Discusses Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes at Colloquium

On 20 November 2013, Professor Tom Ginsburg presented several chapters from his forthcoming edited volume (co-edited with Alberto Simpser of the University of Chicago), Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes, at the Constitutional Transitions & Global and Comparative Law Colloquium. Ginsburg is Leo Spitz Professor of International Law at the University of Chicago Law School.

The chapters Ginsburg presented address the questions of whether constitutions in authoritarian regimes matter, and if so, how and why they matter. To investigate these questions, he conducted a sweeping study of past and present constitutions, coding them as authoritarian or democratic using a set of measures known as the Unified Democracy Scores (UDS). He then looked at various design features of those constitutions, including their levels of specificity (the number of topics included in the text, and at what length they are discussed) and the rights enumerated in the text. Ginsburg’s study found that historically, the majority of constitutions have been authoritarian, but democratic constitutions have been on the rise in recent years, peaking in 2008 at 44% of constitutions.

Read more at ConstitutionalTransitions.org