United States Constitutional History Resources
- Introduction
Conducting a Literature Review
Step two: search law review databases, step three: search non-law databases, step four: search the library catalog, step five: check cited and citing resources, determining if you are finished.
- Documentary Histories and Bibliographies
- Archival Collections and Primary Sources
- Corpus Linguistics Resources
In order to determine if your topic has been written about before, and also to gather relevant resources, you will need to conduct what is called a "literature review." This involves gathering sources that relate to your topic.
Step One: Develop Your Searches and Start Your Research Log
The first step in a literature review is to develop your search queries. Write down a brief issue statement, then use that issue statement to formulate potential search terms. You may want to use the Law Library's Legal Research Worksheet to structure your thoughts and develop some initial searches.
As you're running your searches, keep track of the databases you have consulted and the search terms you used in each databases. A good way to do this is to use the following style:
Database : [Name of database]
Search Used : [Exact text of search]
Relevant Results Located : [A description of the search results, including the number of results and the number/type of relevant results located]
You will then need to look through law journal and other databases in order to locate materials. Keep in mind that LexisNexis and Westlaw only include law journal articles from the past 20-25 years, and so many relevant sources will not be included in search results from those databases; to locate more historical articles, you will need to look at HeinOnline and the Index to Legal Periodicals. To conduct a more thorough literature review, you will need to check the following databases:
- LexisNexis Secondary Materials
- Westlaw Secondary Sources
In addition to these law-specific databases, you will also find many relevant sources by looking at non-law databases that cover history and social sciences. The following are databases that are likely to have relevant results:
- Google Scholar Google Scholar searches broadly across all disciplines and includes information on citing references. To make it easier to access the full text of articles, use the GSU VPN .
In addition to journal articles, there are a number of books that will be relevant to your research. To locate these, run a search in the library catalog, GIL-Find . Keep in mind that the library catalog does not run a full text search, so you may need to search for more general principles (such as "Fifth Amendment" than in article databases.
The books below are examples of books located in the Law Library collection that discuss the construction of and debates over the Constitution. There are a number of other books available on the same topic.
In addition to these strategies, make sure to check for related articles that may not come up directly in your search. There are two ways to do this:
- In LexisNexis, Westlaw, and any other databases that support it, check for articles that cite to a relevant article you’ve located. In LexisNexis and Westlaw, this means looking at the Shepard’s or KeyCite results.
- In all sources, scour the footnotes/endnotes/cited references. You’ll invariably find relevant resources that you would not have come across otherwise.
Sometimes it can be difficult to tell if you have located all of the resources you need. A good general rule of thumb for this type of project is to stop once you see the same sources over and over again with no new relevant material.
- << Previous: Introduction
- Next: Documentary Histories and Bibliographies >>
- Last Updated: Mar 8, 2024 2:21 PM
- URL: https://libguides.law.gsu.edu/constitutionalhistory
- Constitution
- Aboriginal Rights
- Supreme Law
- Charlottetown Accord
- Duty to Consult
- Abortion Rights in Canada: Morgentaler and Beyond
- Free Expression: The Future of a Fundamental Freedom
- Extremism, Polarization, and the Future of Democracy
- McDonald Lectures
- Charter Series
- Speakers & Panels
- The Media and the Charter (2006)
- Patriation Negotiation (2011)
- Time for Boldness on Senate Reform (2015)
- Reconciliation: Wahkohtowin (2017)
- Legacies of Patriation (2022)
- Reimagining Rivers (2022)
- Seven/Fifty Blog
Review of Constitutional Studies
Published by the Centre for Constitutional Studies since 1993, the Review is Canada’s only peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary, academic journal dedicated to the exploration and analysis of constitutional law and theory.
The Review publishes original scholarly work on the theoretical, functional, and doctrinal aspects of constitutional law, and provides a forum for the analysis of constitutionalism in its various political, social, and historical contexts. The Review also welcomes articles with a focus on comparative or global constitutionalism.
In addition to original scholarly articles, the Review publishes review essays and book reviews of newly published and topical volumes of interest to constitutional scholars.
The Review is indexed in the Index to Canadian Legal Periodical Literature, the Index to Canadian Legal Literature, Current Law Index, Academic Search Complete, CPI.Q, LegalTrac and HeinOnline.
The Centre for Constitutional Studies gratefully acknowledges the continuing support of the Alberta Law Foundation .
Revue d’études constitutionnelles/ Review of Constitutional Studies
Publiée par le Centre d’études constitutionnelles depuis 1993, la Revue est le seul périodique interdisciplinaire canadien avec comité de lecture dédié au droit constitutionnel et à la théorie constitutionnelle.
La Revue publie des contributions originales portant sur les aspects théoriques, fonctionnels et pratiques du droit constitutionnel. Elle encourage aussi la soumission d’articles universitaires analysant le droit constitutionnel dans ses contextes social, politique ou historique, ou consacrés au constitutionnalisme comparé et global.
La Revue publie aussi des textes d’opinion et des comptes rendus critiques de livres.
Les articles de la Revue sont répertoriés dans l’Index à la documentation juridique au Canada, l’Index Scott des périodiques juridiques canadiens, le Current Law Index, l’Academic Search Complete, le CPI.Q, LegalTrac et HeinOnline.
Le Centre d’études constitutionnelles remercie la Alberta Law Foundation pour sa généreuse contribution financière.
Submissions
Style guidelines, article submissions.
Joshua Nichols, Co-Editor-in-Chief Chancellor Day Hall 3674 Peel Street Room 43 Montreal, Quebec Canada H3A 1W9
Email: [email protected]
Book Review Submissions
Yearly subscriptions, review editorial board, advisory board members.
Legal Principles, Constitutional Principles and Judicial Review
(2019) 67 American Journal of Comparative Law 899
57 Pages Posted: 4 Aug 2022
Han-Ru Zhou
University of Montreal - Faculty of Law
Date Written: 2019
Principles form part and parcel of our law and legal discourse, so much so that we seldom think of what they are and what they entail. For centuries they have been invoked daily to interpret and argue about the law. But when it comes to matters of constitutional law, principles are further called upon to perform a perennially controversial function: to help police the boundaries of State action. In most common law jurisdictions with a written constitution, this function of principles runs against the generally accepted view that the exercise of judicial review must ultimately be governed and restricted by the terms of the national constitution. This Article argues that the exercise of judicial review based on principles is not confined to that view, once the relationship between principles and the constitution is unpacked and re-contextualized. While the literature on principles in English over the past half-century has been dominated by a select group of Anglo-American scholars, there is a wealth of untapped insights developed in other parts of the world. One of the major contributions by continental legal theorists even predates the earliest modern Anglo-American writings on the subject by more than a decade. Overall, the law literature in common law and civil law systems reveals a significant degree of commonalities in the basic characters of principles despite the absence of initial evidence of transsystemic borrowings. The wider conceptual inquiry also displays a shift in the focus of the debate, from the protracted search for a clear-cut distinction between rules and principles towards a redefinition of principles’ relationship with “written” law, be it in the form of a civil code or a constitutional instrument. From this inquiry re-emerge “unwritten” principles not deriving from codified or legislated law although they have been used to develop the law. Translated into the constitutional domain, these unwritten principles bear no logical connection with the terms of the constitution. Their main functions cover the entire spectrum from serving as interpretive aids to making law by filling gaps. The theoretical framework fits with an ongoing four-century-old narrative of the evolution of constitutional principles and judicial review across most common law-based systems. Constitutional principles are another area where Anglo-American law and legal discourse is less exceptional and more universal than what many assume. Throughout modern Western history, legal battles have been fought and ensuing developments have been made on the grounds of principles. Our law and jurisprudence remains based on them.
Keywords: Legal principles, constitutional principles, judicial review
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Han-Ru Zhou (Contact Author)
University of montreal - faculty of law ( email ).
Pavillon Maximilien-Caron PO Box 6128, station Downtown Montreal, Quebec H3C3J7 Canada +1 514 343 6111 x28498 (Phone)
HOME PAGE: http://hanruzhou.openum.ca
Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?
Paper statistics, related ejournals, comparative law & trans-national studies ejournal.
Subscribe to this fee journal for more curated articles on this topic
Jurisprudence & Legal Philosophy eJournal
English & commonwealth law ejournal, canadian law ejournal.
Comparative Constitutional Law - Science topic
- Recruit researchers
- Join for free
- Login Email Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google Welcome back! Please log in. Email · Hint Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google No account? Sign up
IMAGES
COMMENTS
This is the sixth edition of the Global Review of Constitutional Law. Like prior editions, this 2021 edition of the Global Review assembles detailed but relatively brief reports on constitutional developments and cases during the past calendar year. 75 jurisdictions are covered in this 2021 edition. The reports are authored by academic and/or ...
2. Retrospective—Judicial review and public law. Our thesis is primarily concerned with constitutional judicial review, but the boundaries of the "constitutional" are oftentimes fuzzy. There is, as noted, allegedly very limited causal relation between the rise of administrative judicial review and constitutional judicial review.
The first step in a literature review is to develop your search queries. Write down a brief issue statement, then use that issue statement to formulate potential search terms. You may want to use the Law Library's Legal Research Worksheet to structure your thoughts and develop some initial searches.
Introduction. Nearly a generation ago, Justice Scalia and Justice Breyer debated the legitimacy and value of using foreign law to interpret the American Constitution. 1 At the time, the matter was controversial and invited the interest of both judges and scholars. Foreign law had, after all, been relied on in significant cases like Roper v.Simmons 2 and Lawrence v.
Constitutional review 1 is the power of a body, usually a court, to assess whether a law or government action complies with the constitution. Originating in the US constitutional order, it has spread all over the world and is now a ubiquitous feature of government: nearly three-quarters of constitutions in force provide for it, including those of many non-democracies (Ginsburg and Versteeg ...
Published by the Centre for Constitutional Studies since 1993, the Review is Canada's only peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary, academic journal dedicated to the exploration and analysis of constitutional law and theory. The Review publishes original scholarly work on the theoretical, functional, and doctrinal aspects of constitutional law, and provides a forum for the analysis of ...
most fundamental notions in law; they ground our legal reasoning; they pervade our legal discourse. However, with a few notable excep-tions, most dating back several decades, they have attracted far less scrutiny in the law literature from common law-based systems than other emblematic notions such as rights, precedents, and morality.
8 For discussions of the theoretical background of the development of judicial review and references to the literature on the subject, see B. F. Wright, American Interpretations of Natural Law (Cambridge, 1931); C. G. Haines, The Revival of Natural Law Concepts ... The Growth of American Constitutional Law (New York, 1942), Chs. 1 and 2; E. B ...
of comparative constitutional law."5 Though the study of comparative constitutional law may not quite require a defense at present, much remains to be settled. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the question — crudely put — was whether we could compare the constitutional law of different nations. Could a com-
COMPARATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL LAW: JUDICIAL REVIEW. Although judicial review is not vital to preserving the integrity and effectiveness of a written constitution, it is undeniable that most Western countries, regardless of their particular system of law, have conferred upon courts the power to set aside legislation that contra-dicts the constitution.
Abstract. The field of comparative constitutional law has grown immensely over the past couple of decades. Once a minor and obscure adjunct to the field of domestic constitutional law, comparative constitutional law has now moved front and centre. Driven by the global spread of democratic government and the expansion of international human ...
In conclusion, the Article calls for a new research direction to establish the general literature on constitutional review that reflects the institution-independent concept. ... * Ph.D., Maurer School of Law, Indiana University. For their generous support throughout his doctoral studies, he would like to thank the Rotary Global Grant ...
Comparative constitutional law is a newly energized field in the early 21st century. Never before has the field had such a broad range of interdisciplinary interest, with lawyers, politi- ... Voigt 1999), the literature in constitutional political economy focused more on theory than empirics, but it did provide a set of working assump-tions and ...
The theoretical framework fits with an ongoing four-century-old narrative of the evolution of constitutional principles and judicial review across most common law-based systems. Constitutional principles are another area where Anglo-American law and legal discourse is less exceptional and more universal than what many assume.
Comparative constitutional law spans a wide variety of sub-topics. This page provides an introduction and recommends a few works on a small selection of those topics. ... It examines international and national legal frameworks and related case law as well as pertinent scholarly literature review to highlight this development. Perez-Escolar ...
The study of comparative constitutional law began when the study of comparative law did, but the waves of constitution-making during the twentieth century reinvigorated the field. Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, a predecessor to all contemporary comparative legal scholarship, can readily be taken as an inquiry into comparative constitutional law.
"The Fundamental Law behind the Constitution of the United States," and that by Professor S. E. Thorne on "The Constitution and the Courts: A Re-examination of the Famous Case of Dr. Bonham." The third part of the volume is composed of nine papers which discuss the influence of the Constitution of the United States in other countries.
Explore the latest full-text research PDFs, articles, conference papers, preprints and more on COMPARATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL LAW. Find methods information, sources, references or conduct a literature ...
One of social science's basic impulses is captured in the familiar aphorism, "making the strange familiar." 1 The phrase also finds ready purchase within comparative constitutional law. This is because the comparative enterprise, like much of social science, is fundamentally a rationalizing one, an attempt to lay claim to the world and contain it in terms that we know.
From the 'Law and Literature' movement, two major sub- categories of work that have emerged are "Literature as Law" and "Law in Literature". However, a third category which was born 7 Sandalow, Terrance Constitutional Interpretation. Michigan Law Review 79:1033-1072.
Methodologies of constitutional comparison vary at least as much as, if not more than, do methodologies more generally in comparative law. Methods vary in what they aim to do and in who is engaged in comparisons, particularly if the comparative enterprise is defined broadly to include doctrine produced by courts, features of government (such as parliamentary vs presidential systems, more ...