Chairs
Zachary Elkins zelkins@austin.utexas.edu; Ashley Moran ashleymoran@utexas.edu

Constitution drafters and researchers have long explored the origins and evolution of constitutional ideas to understand why constitutions succeed and falter, when constitutional ideas gain traction, and how they shape people’s lives. Yet it remains difficult to analyse these questions across different countries and contexts without a coordinated approach to naming and conceptualising such ideas.

In some fields, such as biology and psychiatry, the systematisation and organisation of concepts have been central concerns and have even led to high levels of consensus regarding categories and terminology. In other fields, such as law and political science, concepts are less standardised. The proliferation of conceptual frameworks in these domains has tangible consequences. It constrains systematic comparison and the alignment of findings across studies and, in turn, hampers the accumulation of knowledge.

The call for sustainable constitutionalism presents a new challenge not only for governance but also for the research that informs it. This call responds to the need for new approaches capable of addressing long-standing democratic, societal, and environmental challenges, as well as the rapidly escalating risks facing constitutionalism itself amid profound political, social, economic, and technological transformations worldwide. Meeting this challenge requires new conceptual frameworks to understand how constitutions contribute both to these challenges and to their solutions.

This workshop examines concepts that are crucial to understanding the current challenges facing sustainable democratic societies and to conceiving new pathways that advance a more sustainable constitutionalism. Workshop papers will explore concepts that are central to constitutional theories explaining these dynamics, innovative constitutional approaches to such challenges and their solutions, judicial interpretations of these innovations, and other aspects of understanding and advancing sustainable constitutionalism.

Concepts proposed in workshop papers will be considered for inclusion in the Constitute ontology, which is used by the convenors to track constitutional topics across the world.