15 Why Law Was Late to Comparative Constitutional Amendment

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.