Constitutional Ethnography: An Introduction

19 Pages Posted: 29 Oct 2004

See all articles by Kim Lane Scheppele

Kim Lane Scheppele

Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University; University Center for Human Values, Princeton University

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Abstract

Constitutional ethnography is the study of the central legal elements of polities using methods that are capable of recovering the lived detail of the politico-legal landscape. This article provides an introduction to this sort of study by contrasting constitutional ethnography with multivariate analysis and with nationalist constitutional analysis. The article advocates not a universal one-size-fits-all theory or an elegant model that abstracts away the distinctive, but instead outlines an approach that can identify a set of repertoires found in real cases. Learning the set of repertoires that constitutional ethnography reveals, one can see more deeply into particular cases. Constitutional ethnography has as its goal, then, not prediction but comprehension, not explained variation but thematization.

Keywords: Constitutional Ethnography

Suggested Citation

Scheppele, Kim Lane, Constitutional Ethnography: An Introduction. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=611862

Kim Lane Scheppele (Contact Author)

Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University ( email )

Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544-1021
United States
609-258-6949 (Phone)
609-258-0922 (Fax)

University Center for Human Values, Princeton University ( email )

304 Louis Marx Hall
Princeton, NJ 08544
United States

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