Comparative constitutionalism as a distinctive field is historically deep and empirically wide. Scholars of politics have compared constitutions since the days of Aristotle. And writing constitutions is increasingly a transnational enterprise, involving the melding of domestic politics, foreign experiences, and international expertise.

Some things should now be clear from an admittedly very diverse set of global experiments with writing constitutions: a constitution that attempts to please everyone, specify too much, and open itself too easily to extensive rewriting will be verbose, ugly, friendly to rent-seeking, overly rigid in details but also overly friendly to rapid change. In short, it would resemble an ordinary law more than our image of what a constitution should be.

With appropriate hedges and qualifications, Zachary Elkins, Tom Ginsburg, and James Melton now tell us that this would be a good thing—assuming we want an enduring constitution (and, with even more qualifications, they think we usually should). As they say in closing, “Constitutions endure, we find, when they are more like statutes—flexible, detailed, and infused with self-interest—than the conventional image of constitutions would have it” (p. 211). In the process they come close to arguing that constitutional politics can work (and be understood) best the less it is treated as a distinctive field.

The field of comparative constitutional analysis that they wish to enter (and perhaps gently undermine) is quite diverse. Actually, it is not so much a single field as a collection of disparate intellectual enterprises—each with its own set of questions, assumptions, conventions and blind spots—clustered around an a single phenomenon: a written constitutional text. Normative political theory has long focused on constitutions and constitutionalism; specialists in comparative politics have discovered (and then abandoned only to have a subsequent generation rediscover) constitutional analysis; legal scholars have probed specific language and institutional arrangements; judicial specialists have sometimes shown a special interest in constitutional law and adjudication of constitutional disputes; new institutionalists have discovered that constitutional design provides fertile ground for study; scholars of specific countries and regions (of course the United States but also other areas such as eastern Europe and Africa) have increasingly reached outwards in order to better understand the cases they study. Actually, to say that these diverse inquiries are unified by a common subject matter is itself an exaggeration since the term “constitution” has prompted some of the most wide-ranging definitional discussions among disciplines already inclined toward prolonged terminological tussles.

Elkins, Ginsburg, and Melton attempt to draw on and contribute to these various intellectual traditions (though they are too modest and too inductive to pretend to resolve any of them). They succeed. While their book is broad it is not shallow. They have some interest in what makes for better and worse constitutions and therefore participate usefully in some of the normative debates. But their real interest lies less in theory and more in what makes constitutions last longer in practice. They do pay considerable attention to the environment in which constitutions are written, but their deepest interest is in questions of design. How can a constitution be written to make it last longer?

In attempting to answer this question, they use a variety of tools. First, they delve into some of the theoretical debate, arguing gingerly that constitutions are likely to last longer if they are written in an inclusive process, favor specificity over generality, and allow for flexibility in their application and especially their revision. This is far from a banal set of claims; indeed, they stand in sharp contrast to much of the writings in various fields on constitutions. An inclusive process is often held to risk promotion of rent-seeking and short-sighted politics; a specific text might seem to be rigid and allow little room for normal politics; and a constitution that can be amended with ease may open basic arrangements to constant contestation and renegotiation. Elkins, Ginsburg, and Melton are bucking much conventional wisdom, though they are fairly tentative in the way they advance their claims.

Their hesitancy is largely because they are primarily interested in empirical analysis. They set to work using a variety of tools—chiefly statistical analysis and a set of structured case studies—to test their ideas. Because they are careful, and perhaps because they are more comfortable working inductively, their findings are presented as largely consistent with their claims but far from definitive. The authors' empiricism is not careless; neither is it mindless. They pose important questions of broad interest, and their findings, for all their tentativeness, are striking and will be of interest to the many communities of scholars (and the army of international experts and consultants) interested in constitution drafting.

Readers who find data analysis deadening will be kept alert by a lively writing style. Some might object that “lively” is not the best term to use. While they focus on the birth of constitutions, their real interest is in their death. Organic metaphors are very common in constitutional analysis, but Elkins, Ginsburg, and Melton favor a set of morbid variants. They speak not only of “constitutional death,” but also analyze “risk factors” and label their approach “epidemiological.” When they confront the fact that the American constitutional experience seems to run counter to their general lessons, they compare it to a woman who lived to a 120 subsisting on chocolates, cigarettes, olive oil, and wine. (It should be noted here that they avoid the troublesome if increasingly less common tendency of American authors on constitutions to use their own country's experience as the only yardstick of constitutional standards and store of constitutional experiences. The United States is a steady but not dominant presence in their analysis).

But if disease and death provide the most frequent metaphors for the authors, ultimately more provocative is their observation that writing constitutions is like nothing more than politics more generally. Constitution drafting is a less distinctive form of politics than so many have come to think: they conclude iconoclastically that “the overall thrust of our argument is to emphasize the similarities between constitutional politics and ordinary politics” (p. 211).