Gabriel Negretto offers a generous overall assessment of Modern Constitutions. He also usefully calls for discussion of “how to study constitutionalism and constitution making in comparative perspective,” and he offers cogent observations about what Modern Constitutions might do that it does not. Professor Negretto does not dispute the arguments that the book’s contributors advance, although he stresses that the US Constitution’s checks on majoritarian abuses have wider relevance today than some acknowledge. He does suggest that the book would benefit from a more developed analytical framework with more systematic comparisons and discussion of more constitutional issues, particularly questions of mass and elite roles in originating and maintaining constitutions.

In reply, let me note that there are different types of edited volumes that make different sorts of contributions. Professor Negretto’s volume represents one type. He provided its contributors with a well-developed theoretical framework of issues involved in creating new constitutions in existing democratic regimes, and they all relied on it to some degree. It fostered a focus in most chapters on the roles of existing legal processes, democratic majorities, and elites in crafting constitutions, as well as constitutional protections against, especially, majoritarian authoritarianism. As my review indicated, I see this endeavor as altogether commendable.

Inevitably, however, costs accompany the benefits of having such a specific, shared focus. Among other things, Negretto and his collaborators give limited attention to the substantive rights provided for in various constitutions, nor do they consider constitutions forged in regimes that are not defensibly democratic. As I observed, these are features, not flaws, of this sort of edited volume—but they also confirm that no one type of volume can do everything.

Modern Constitutions is a different beast. It brings together an array of contributors that Professor Negretto rightly calls “stellar.” They were invited to share their views on a broadly defined topic—modern constitution making—without seeking to impose on them any particular framework or focus. The volume’s introduction does identify core concerns of modern constitutions that the ensuing chapters collectively address, but contributors were not tasked with discussing all of them nor confined to discussing only them.

As a result, the volume addresses a great variety of topics. They include the differences between the rights and institutions in the US Constitution and those of many American states and other nations; the partial convergence globally on human dignity as a constitutional value; the challenges of recognizing or denying ethnonational identities; the values of constitutionalism for authoritarian regimes; and the authoritarian potential of even apparently democratic constitution-making processes, among other subjects. A brief conclusion draws some shared lessons from these diverse contributions. However, the volume does not cover every important topic, and its discussions are indeed more diffuse than those arising from a shared theoretical framework.

Still, both types of edited volumes can make significant, if distinct, contributions to studies of constitutionalism and to other topics as well. In fact, I venture to say that both the examples of these different types considered here have done so.