Concept Integration in Comparative Law: Linking Constitutional, Consultation, and Court Analysis

University Of Texas At Austin, Austin TX

Investigators

Abstract

Constitution drafters and researchers have long explored the origins and consequences of constitutional ideas—to learn why constitutions succeed and falter, when constitutional ideas gain traction, and how they can shape people’s lives. Yet it is hard to analyze these questions across different countries and contexts without a coordinated approach to naming and conceptualizing these ideas. In some fields, systematizing and organizing concepts has been a central concern, and has even led to high levels of consensus on categories and terms. In other fields, such as Law and Political Science, concepts are less regulated. This project uses digital tools to accelerate a more systematic approach to the representation of ideas in comparative law. The goal is to improve constitutional design by organizing and enriching the historical and cross-national information available to constitution drafters and analysts. The project will deliver a series of research products including (1) a comprehensive inventory of topics in constitutions worldwide, which integrates and “maps” related concepts invoked across research projects in the field, (2) new methods for discovering and tracing ideas embedded in public comments during episodes of constitutional consultation, and (3) a systematic analysis of constitutional ideas embedded in court rulings worldwide, revealing which constitutional ideas gain traction and how they evolve after the constitution’s adoption. These and other intermediate products—in the form of data, publications, and online interfaces—will be actively disseminated in international research communities in Law, Political Science, and Information Technology. The project uses new and evolving natural language processing (NLP) tools and the team’s domain knowledge in constitutional law to facilitate the systematic comparison, integration, and application of concepts in comparative law. The project employs these tools to: (1) refine the Comparative Constitutions Project (CCP) ontology for use with NLP tools and integrate multiple conceptual frameworks from comparative law to provide broader topic coverage, (2) use the new CCP ontology to provide section-level topic coverage of national constitutions globally, (3) link constitutional content to public consultation input to assess the prevalence, evolution, and uptake of constitutional ideas raised by citizens, and (4) link constitutional content to court rulings to assess the prevalence, evolution, and extension of constitutional ideas raised in court rulings across countries. The project’s methodological contribution lies in developing multilingual concept processing tools that compare and integrate concepts and ontologies in comparative law. Its ontological contribution lies in developing a replicable process for optimizing the performance of ontologies in semantic-similarity applications, refining and expanding the CCP ontology, and creating a public repository for ontologies in comparative law. Its substantive contributions identify geographic and temporal patterns in the constitutional ideas entrenched in constitutions, raised by citizens, and litigated in courts. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.