演講者簡介 : Professor Mila Versteeg received her Ph.D. in Socio-Legal Studies from the University of Oxford in 2011. She is currently the Martha Lubin Karsh and Bruce A. Karsh Bicentennial Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. Her research interests are Comparative Constitutional Law, Public International Law, and Empirical Legal Studies.
演講摘要 : Long lists of rights have become a hallmark of global constitutionalism. This rights inflation has largely been cheered on by commentators arguing that enshrining more rights will help produce more just societies. In contrast, we argue that adding more de jure rights to constitutions can provide governments with excuses to ignore rights they disfavor, which in turn can lead to erosion of de facto rights protections. We explore this theory using a mixed-methods approach, which includes a survey experiment administered during a constitutional referendum in Chile, event studies using cross-country data from 1946-2018, and a qualitative case study investigating the adoption of Russia’s 1993 constitution. We find evidence that the public believes that adding more rights to a constitution is costless, but our quantitative and qualitative data suggests that new constitutions that include many rights have worse de facto rights protections than ones with fewer rights.
