DO CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTIONS BIND?

Constitutional Conventions and the Deficit

Historical Gloss , Constitutional Conventions , and the Judicial Separation of Powers

Scholars have increasingly focused on the relevance of post-Founding historical practice to discerning the separation of powers between Congress and the Executive Branch, and the Supreme Court has recently endorsed the relevance of such practice. Much less attention has been paid, however, to the relevance of historical practice to discerning the separation of powers between the political branc...

Gloss , Constitutional Conventions , and the Judicial Separation of Powers

Scholars have increasingly focused on the relevance of post-Founding historical practice to discern the separation of powers between Congress and the executive branch, and the Supreme Court has recently endorsed the relevance of such practice. Much less attention has been paid, however, to the relevance of historical practice to discerning the separation of powers between the political branches...

Do Constitutional Rights Matter?∗

The critique of constitutions as mere parchment barriers is as old as the practice of writing them down. Yet states put a good deal of energy into drafting constitutions and some, inevitably, do so with the intention of abiding by their provisions. The purpose of the following article is to explore this possibility. I develop a theory of constitutional enforcement and test it using data spannin...

Do Conventions Need To Be Common Knowledge?

Do conventions need to be common knowledge? David Lewis builds this requirement into his definition of a convention. This paper explores the extent to which his approach finds support in the game theory literature. The knowledge formalism developed by Robert Aumann and others militates against Lewis’s approach, because it demonstrates that it is almost impossible for something to become common ...