Comparing constitutions

Constitutions are projects that combine self-rule and law-rule to establish structural powers, their separation, cooperation, and authority. This chapter tracks the evolution of comparative constitutional law and considers its development towards critical reasoning methods from conventional reasoning, which has tangentially relied on functionalist and formalist methodology. While modern constitutions maintain certain construction similarities that tend to corroborate a narrative of a global constitutional development, critical approaches should reject a linear, evolutionary view of development and, instead, highlight the importance of contextualizing constitutional layers such as archetypes, constitutional design, projects, and ideas from elites and social movements. The chapter grounds its discussion in a legal problem relating to constitutional conflicts concerning the practice of veiling in Western constitutional democracies. This asks the reader to contemplate conventional and critical comparative methods as well as the role of legal transfers, and presents the inherently comparative nature of court opinions addressing this practice.