Socialist Constitutional Legacies

Constitutional Theory, Constitutional Culture

Constitutional theorists and other constitutional commentators make heavy use of a paradigm that mistakes certain aspects of our current constitutional decisionmaking process for inherent parts of our constitutional structure and ignores other important aspects of that process entirely. These distortions and elisions raise concerns about the accuracy of much descriptive constitutional commentar...

Constitutional Economics/Constitutional Politics

Why does the treatment of American constitutional politics presented in We the People depart so radically from models of constitutional deliberation developed in the type of constitutional economics pioneered by James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock? The paper defines three premises that account for the divergence, and concludes by proposing an inquiry into constitutional design that requires insig...

China’s Post-Socialist Inequality

Since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the launch of market reforms under Deng Xiaoping’s leadership in 1978, China has undergone dramatic changes that have affected the lives of Chinese citizens in multiple ways. With the step-by-step dismantling of China’s system of centrally planned socialism and other reforms, growth rates have accelerated, producing rising living standards, reduced pove...

Constitutional Amendment by Constitutional Desuetude

Scholars have shown that written constitutions may be informally amended in various ways, for instance by judicial interpretation, statute, or executive action. But scholars have yet to fully appreciate that written constitutions may also be informally amended by desuetude. Informal amendment by constitutional desue-tude occurs when a constitutional provision loses its binding force upon politi...

Gendering Socialist Popular Cultures