Ran Hirschl has made an extraordinary contribution to the creation of what might best be described as a self-reflexive vision of the field of comparative constitutionalism. In this third, and I hope not final, book—despite his disclaimer in the acknowledgments—Hirschl again explores “the intersecting worlds of constitutional law and comparative politics” (p. v), producing what Tom Ginsburg of the University of Chicago aptly describes as “an instant classic,” part intellectual history and part methodological manifesto. In Comparative Matters, Hirschl ably achieves his goal of clarifying “the essence of the term ‘comparative’ as a project and a method” (p. 5). This is simply a seminal work in the field of comparative constitutionalism. The book further advances the field by applying a much-needed critical analysis to the range of studies and approaches upon which scholars in the field have focused: including the choice of specific jurisdictions, described by the author as the “World Series” of comparative constitutional law, as well as the normative priorities of most participants in the field, which, he argues, reflects a “deep liberal bent” (p. 17).

Hirschl’s central argument involves a tri-modal analysis that seeks to demonstrate that the “history of epistemological leaps in comparative public law” is rooted in three dynamic motivational forces—“need, intellect and politics”—each of which might in combination or singularly drive the process of comparison at different times and in different places (p. 149). First is the need of “extra-large political entities,” on the one hand, or “minority groups,” on the other hand, to manage diverse communities or to maintain their own identities by “opening up to the laws of others” (p. 148). Second is the intellectual curiosity of scholars, political actors, and members of the legal profession—from judges to advocates and councilors—to understand their “own constitutional setting” by comparing, contrasting, and analogizing their own situations to that of others understood to be in comparable contexts (p. 148). Finally, there is the use by constitutional designers, judges, and politicians of “comparative engagement as a means of promoting a concrete political agenda and worldview,” which may be advanced by exploring the constitutional formulations, interpretations, and laws of others (pp. 148–49). Building on this analytical construct, Hirschl concludes with three important insights: first, that engagement with the laws of others has a long history; second, that this comparative engagement is as much a political act as a legal one (p. 282); and third, that the “dramatic political transformations of the past few decades” has produced a “renaissance of comparative constitutional inquiry [that has been] greatly facilitated by economic and technological interconnectedness” (p. 283).

The book is structured in two parts with three chapters in each. The first part explores the “history of engagement with the constitutive laws of others” and serves to identify the factors that have advanced the comparative project through the ages. Two of the chapters in this part explore specific dimensions of this engagement. In “View from the Bench,” Hirschl begins his exploration by analyzing how constitutional courts and judges, described as the “key purveyors and consumers of comparative constitutional jurisprudence,” engage with foreign constitutional law, focusing in particular on their choices and methods (p. 20). After surveying the use of foreign citations by courts across the globe to demonstrate “what is actually known about patterns of foreign reference,” the chapter uses a close analysis of the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court of Israel to explore what Hirschl identifies as a core element in the use of comparative constitutional jurisprudence—the “identity construction factor” (p. 41). The chapter concludes by showing how identity construction may be identified in the work of other peak courts that often position themselves as bastions of “universalism and cosmopolitanism” (p. 68). The overall approach of this chapter, Hirschl concludes, allows us to “track where and how the judicial imagination travels” (p. 20), and while much of the field focuses on judicial behavior, the author stresses that these encounters are “as much a humanist and sociopolitical phenomenon as they are a juridical one” (p. 6).

The second and third chapters, “Early Engagements with the Constitutive Laws of Others” and “Engaging the Constitutive Laws of Others,” are used by Hirschl to both dispel the myth that engagement with the laws of others is a new phenomenon and to produce an epistemological history of comparative constitutional law. Approaching the question of engagement from the perspective of “the fundamental tension between forces of legal convergence and enduring patterns of divergence” (p. 81), he explores the deep history of engagement and its comparative dimension from the time of the early Hellenic world, arguing that constitutional law and religious law have much more in common than is usually acknowledged, as they are both “revered symbolic systems that reflect ideals, aspirations, and principles that are larger than ordinary life” (p. 110).

This first part of the book ends with the construction of an intellectual history of comparative public law through a contextual account of the work of four scholars—Jean Bodin, John Selden, Montesquieu and Simon Bolivar—whose engagement spans four centuries as well as a discussion contrasting the diametrically opposite responses by two neighboring states, Canada and the United States, to comparative constitutional law in the late twentieth century. Hirschl uses these encounters over five centuries and through fundamentally different social and political contexts to distill his central argument—that the essence of the comparative impulse is driven by need, intellect, and politics.

The second part of the book focuses on the modern academic field of comparative constitutional law in general. Hirschl’s approach involves both attention to the “disciplinary boundaries between comparative constitutional law and the social sciences” and a focus on the mix of methodologies that might be usefully applied to the task of going “beyond analysis of court rulings … toward a more holistic approach to the study of constitutions across polities” (p. 15). The first chapter in this part, “From Comparative Constitutional Law to Comparative Constitutional Studies,” makes the case for an interdisciplinary approach to the subject. This Hirschl does by demonstrating both the limits of “settling for the insular study of judicial reasoning without taking into account the socio-political context” in which the judgment was made or the court operates (p. 168) and by explaining that comparative constitutionalism was founded in the social sciences—and among political scientists—long before “contemporary comparative constitutional studies” was appropriated by law schools (p. 164).

In the final two chapters in this part, “How Universal Is Comparative Constitutional Law?” and “Case Selection and Research Design in Comparative Constitutional Studies,” the author focuses on the appropriate methodologies that might be brought to bear in building the field as a means for addressing his criticism of the field as having a “loose and under-defined epistemic and methodological framework” (p. 5). While he reiterates the fact that “methodology concerns the means and not the ends of academic inquiry” (p. 281) and describes his own vision as one of “methodological pluralism” (p. 280), his empirical vision seems to lean toward a faith in quantitative methods—such as large-n studies—although to be fair, this emphasis might be simply a response to the overly normative approach that he sees as dominating the field. Hirschl’s methodological stance seems in part a reaction to what he describes as the “global south” critique of the project of comparative constitutional law. While he recognizes and accepts the two main thrusts of the critique—the limited sample of countries and the liberal bias of the dominant literature in the field—he also delivers his own critique of the very notion of a “global south” in the realm of constitutionalism, particularly as to what it might add “to theory-building as such” (p. 222).

Hirschl’s critique is fair to the extent that there is neither a single global North nor a single global South; however, it also reveals a gap in his methodological and epistemological approach. While his discussion of the critique from the “global south” recognizes and even emphasizes the relevance of economic disparities between countries and the significance of the sociopolitical context, there is little recognition of the need for a sociological approach that might recognize the ways in which constitutions simultaneously constitute power within society and are shaped by the political economy within which they are embedded. Even as the author acknowledges the value of “concept formation through multiple description,” he emphasizes the need for a greater focus on “causality, inference and explanation” (p. 228). A more explicitly sociological approach to understanding constitutionalism and conducting comparative analysis might explore the relationship between the social processes, including the political economy of the society, that produce particular constitutional settlements or arrangements at any particular moment in time and the continuing role that the constitutional ideas and institutions play in the creation and transformation of a society’s constitutional identity. Such an approach may provide a clearer means of exploring the link between a society’s constitutional identity and the particular options embraced, both in the jurisprudence of its courts and in the response of the courts to the range of options available in the realm of comparative constitutional jurisprudence.