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Mark Tushnet, Writing While Quarantined: A Personal Interpretation of Contemporary Comparative Constitutional Law (Harv. Pub. L. Working Paper No. 20-19, 2020).


Abstract: This Essay is a personal reflection on the state of scholarship in the field of comparative constitutional law. I draw parallels between the development of and reaction to “critical perspectives” on domestic US constitutional law in the 1970s and 1980s and the development and reaction to similar perspectives on comparative constitutional law today. I argue that the parallels have similar political roots, in concern that critical perspectives undermine the ability of constitutional law, whether domestic or comparative, to resist conservative and anti-liberal tendencies. I conclude with some speculations about the source of the political commitments by scholars of comparative constitutional law, and in particular about the way the field’s overall cosmopolitanism affects scholarship on anti-cosmopolitan populisms.