An Earth Constitution? Building a Global Movement

BY Ben Manski

This article was originally published on the Great Transition Initiative as part of the Forum “An Earth Constitution: Has Its Time Come?”

Does the process of constitution-making matter more than the particularities of constitutional design? Recently published research by a growing range of social scientists and legal scholars indicates yes. For instance, in their book Constituents Before Assembly, Todd Eisenstadt, A. Carl LeVan, and Tofigh Maboudi provide their findings from a sweeping empirical analysis of the effects of popular participation in constitutionalization.¹ The takeaway? As noted in my Law & Society Review review, “participatory constitution-making…has a lasting and systematic effect on subsequent democratization.”²