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87 N.Y.U. L. Rev. Online 1 (2012)

handle is hein.journals/nyulro87 and id is 1 raw text is: RESPONSE METHOD IN COMPARATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL LAW: A COMMENT ON LAW AND VERSTEEG SUJIT CHOUDHRY* In response to David S. Law & Mila Versteeg, The Declining Influence of the United States Constitution, 87 N.Y.U. L. REV. 762 (2012). INTRODUCTION Of the many questions raised by David Law and Mila Versteeg's important article,' I want to focus on two. First, as a methodological matter, do they measure constitutional convergence and divergence in the right way? Second, what is the relationship between quantitative, large-n work of the genre represented by Law and Versteeg's article and small-n, qualitative work that has hitherto been the favored methodological approach in comparative constitutional law and politics? I MEASURING CONVERGENCE AND DIVERGENCE Law and Versteeg measure constitutional convergence by treating each dimension of a constitution as a binary variable.2 For bills of rights, they aggregate the number of rights-protecting provisions to sixty, and make a series of pairwise comparisons between each bill of rights and, inter alia, (a) a hypothetical, generic bill of rights,3 and (b) the U.S. Constitution.4 With respect to rights- * Copyright @ 2012 by Sujit Choudhry, Cecelia Goetz Professor of Law, Faculty Director, Center for Constitutional Transitions (www.constitutionaltransitions.org), New York University School of Law. I thank the editors of the New York University Law Review for inviting me to contribute this comment, David Law and Mila Versteeg for sharing a portion of their dataset with me, and Aqeel Noorali for excellent research assistance. 1 David S. Law & Mila Versteeg, The Declining Influence of the United States Constitution, 87 N.Y.U. L. REV. 762 (2012). 2 Id. at 771-72. 3 See id. at 776-79 (describing a generic bill of rights). 4 See id. at 781-84 (describing declining similarity between the U.S. Constitution and 1

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