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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.

T his article highlights a gap between a great deal of constitutional theory and a great deal of the practice of democratic constitution-making. Drawing on data from democratic national and state constitutions, we challenge the consensus among constitutional theorists that a central purpose of constitutionalism is the entrenchment (the fortification against future change) of broad principles. The empirical reality is that the majority of democratic constitutions today are subject to frequent revision, and are therefore ill-equipped to facilitate the entrenchment of their contents. To explore the logic of these unentrenched documents, we identify the historical periods in which different geographic regions moved away from highly entrenched constitutions, and we examine the political contexts of these transformations. We find that, in each context, constitution-makers were attempting to limit the discretion of constitutional interpreters and implementers by drafting highly specific texts and by updating them in response to continually changing circumstances.

The human rights movement has spent considerable energy developing and promoting the adoption of both international and domestic legal prohibitions against torture. Empirical scholarship testing the effectiveness of these prohibitions using observational data, however, has produced mixed results. In this paper, we explore one possible mechanism through which these prohibitions may be effective: dampening public support for torture. Specifically, we conducted a survey experiment to explore the impact of international and constitutional law on public support for torture. We found that a bare majority of respondents in our control group support the use of torture, and that presenting respondents with arguments that this practice violates international law or constitutional law did not produce a statistically significant decrease in support. These findings are consistent with prior research suggesting, even in democracies, that legal prohibitions on torture have been ineffective.

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.