I argue that legal and constitutional theory should avoid the idea of constituent power. It is unhelpful in seeking to understand the authority of law and the place of written constitutions in such an understanding. In particular, it results in a deep ambivalence about whether authority is...

Despite persistent calls for more empirical legal scholarship, only recently have scholars provided evidence that empirical legal scholarship has indeed entered the mainstream of the legal academy. Defining empirical scholarship as the systematic organization of a series of observations with the...