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A long-standing consensus exists that the arbitrary or excessive expropriation of private property by a country hurts its economic growth. Although constitutions can play an important role in protecting private property, remarkably little is known about how they actually restrict the power of eminent domain and whether such restrictions are associated with reduced de facto expropriation risks. This Essay fills that gap by presenting original data on the procedural and substantive protections in constitutional takings clauses from 1946 to 2013. Its main finding is that no observable relationship exists between de jure constitutional restrictions on the power of eminent domain and de facto expropriation risks. This Essay explores two possible explanations for why constitutional restrictions on the power of eminent domain fail to make a difference in practice. The first is that countries adopt disingenuous promises to bolster their international reputation or to attract foreign aid. The second explanation holds that societal disagreements over the desired level of expropriation might be built into the constitution's design. Such disagreements emerge when a portion of citizens believe they benefit more from expropriation than from the general benefits that flow from secure property rights. This Essay finds empirical support for the second explanation. Specifically, it finds that real-world constitutional property regimes are often riddled with ambiguities. That is, constitutions often include strong procedural and substantive restrictions on the power of eminent domain but also include "fine print" that can undermine those restrictions. This Essay finds that when accounting for such fine print, constitutional restrictions on the power of eminent domain appear to be correlated with reduced expropriation risks. This finding suggests that the effectiveness of takings clauses might depend on the politics surrounding their adoption.

Although the question of whether constitutional rights matter is of great theoretical and practical importance, little is known about whether constitutional rights impact government behavior. In this article, we test the effectiveness of six political rights. We hypothesize that a difference exists between organizational rights—most notably, the rights to unionize and form political parties—and individual rights. Specifically, we suggest that organizational rights increase de facto rights protection because they create organizations with the incentives and means to protect the underlying right, which renders these rights self‐enforcing. Such organizations are not necessarily present to protect individual rights, which could make individual rights less effective. We test our theory using a variety of statistical methods on a data set of constitutional rights for 186 countries. The results support our theory: Organizational rights are associated with increased de facto rights protection, while individual rights are not.

International legal scholars have long recognized the importance of the rules and processes by which states adhere to international legal obligations and "translate" them into their domestic legal systems. Research by political scientists on specific issue areas likewise increasingly recognizes that domestic implementation is crucial to international law compliance and effectiveness. Yet the lack of systematic data makes it difficult to assemble an overall picture of the relationship between international law and domestic law around the world, let alone to document its evolution over time. Recent qualitative surveys of state practice have begun to fill that gap, but provide only a snapshot in time and are limited to relatively few countries. Some quantitative projects cover more countries, but address only a limited number of questions based solely on the text of national constitutions.

At first blush, "comparative international law" might sound like an oxymoron. In principle, international law—at least when it arises from multilateral treaties or general custom—applies equally to all parties or states. As a result, international lawyers often resist emphasizing local, national, or regional approaches due to the field's aspirations to universality and uniformity. Comparativists, meanwhile, frequently overlook the potential to apply comparative law insights to international law on the basis that "rules which are avowedly universal in character do not lend themselves to comparison."