András Jakab, Arthur Dyevre, Giulio Itzcovich: CONREASON – The Comparative Constitutional Reasoning Project. Methodological Dilemmas and Project Design
2015/9
Courts are reason-giving institutions and argumentation plays a central role in constitutional adjudication. Yet a cursory look at just a handful of constitutional systems suggests important differences, as well as commonalities, in the practices of constitutional judges, whether in matters of form, style, language, or other. Over time, too, constitutional reasoning may seem to exhibit both elements of change and elements of continuity. In what measure is this really the case? What is common to constitutional reasoning everywhere? Is the trend one of growing convergence (standardisation of constitutional reasoning?) or, on the contrary, one of increasing fragmentation? To what extent is the language of judicial opinions responsive to the political and social context in which constitutional courts operate? Funded by a grant from the VolkswagenStiftung and housed by the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany, and by the Institute for Legal Studies of the Centre for Social Sciences at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, Hungary, the CONREASON Project endeavours to answer these central questions of comparative constitutional scholarship by applying and developing a new set of quantitative research methods.