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101 Calif. L. Rev. 863 (2013)
Sham Constitutions

handle is hein.journals/calr101 and id is 905 raw text is: California Law Review VOL. 101 AUGUST 2013 No. 4 Copyright © 2013 by California Law Review, Inc., a California Nonprofit Corporation Sham Constitutions David S. Law* & Mila Versteeg** It is often said that constitutions are mere parchment barriers that cannot by themselves limit the power of the state or guarantee respect for rights. Little is known at a global and empirical level, however, about the extent to which countries fall short of their constitutional guarantees. This Article documents empirically the global prevalence and severity of constitutional noncompliance over the last three decades and identifies the worst offenders, or sham constitutions, across several substantive categories. By matching our own data on the rights-related content of the world's constitutions with quantitative indicators of actual human Copyright © 2013 David S. Law & Mila Versteeg. * Professor of Law and Professor of Political Science, Washington University in St. Louis; Visiting Professor, Georgetown University Law Center. ** Associate Professor, University of Virginia School of Law. For their comments and suggestions, we wish to thank Kerry Abrams, Kevin Cope, Christian Davenport, Denis Galligan, Nuno Garoupa, Gerrit de Geest, Mike Gilbert, Tom Ginsburg, Oona Hathaway, Heinz Klug, Paul Mahoney, Andrew Martin, Jud Mathews, James Melton, Anthony Niblett, Victoria Nourse, Jide Nzelibe, Mike Passaportis, Jaya Ramji-Nogales, Peter Spiro, Matt Stephenson, Lesley Wexler, Albert Yoon, David Zaring, and our audiences and interlocutors at the University of Chicago Law School Conference on Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes, the University of Oxford Conference on the Social and Political Foundations of Constitutions, the University of Virginia School of Law faculty retreat, the University of Illinois Colloquium on Law, Behavior, and Social Science, the Constitutional Law Schmooze at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School, the Georgetown Law faculty colloquium, the Empirical Legal Studies Seminar at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, Temple Law School's International Law Colloquium, the Berger Speaker Series at Cornell Law School, and the Wharton School's Legal Studies and Business Ethics Department. Raquel Frisardi, Alec Knight, Alan Lin, and Jared Cole provided valuable research assistance. Special thanks to Elizabeth Drake Mohan and Vahid Gholampour for their dedication above and beyond the call of duty. Collaboration between the authors and extension and updating of the data were made possible by a research grant from the Center for Empirical Research in the Law at Washington University in St. Louis. 863