Mila Versteeg
Biographic Data
| ID | 276451 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Mila Versteeg |
| GIVEN NAMES | Mila |
| FAMILY NAME | Versteeg |
| SIGNATURE | VERSTEEG M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Virginia |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5231-9847 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 119 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Crises of Authority
Constitutional scholars have long observed that the term “constitutional crisis” is overused. Pundits and scholars routinely use it to describe constitutional developments that they view as normatively undesirable. But doing so may hurt our ability to recognize them. We use a comparative and historical perspective to call attention to the worst-case scenario of constitutional breakdown. This scenario, which we will refer to as a “constitutional c…
Do constitutional unamendability rules make a difference
Leaders often try to amend constitutions to remove checks on their powers. To help protect against such democratic erosion, constitutional drafters and jurists sometimes restrict constitutional amendments by: (1) specifying in the constitutional text that certain clauses or principles can never be changed (“Eternity Clauses”); (2) granting apex courts the power to review the procedural validity of amendment processes (“Amendment Review”); or (3) …
Support for Constitutional Rights During Crisis: Evidence from the Pandemic
During times of crisis, governments often consider policies that may promote safety, but that would require overstepping constitutionally protected rights. These policies are frequently adopted by the executive, permitted by the courts and legislative branches, and appear to be supported by the public. But it is not apparent whether the public is less supportive of these policies than they would otherwise be because of these constitutional rules.…
Constitutional Duties
Individual duties—like the responsibility to defend the country, pay taxes, or obey the law—are frequently included in national constitutions, but they are rarely analyzed. This paper empirically examines the origins, evolution, and implications of individual duties in national constitutions using three data sources: (i) a new dataset of duties in national constitutions from 1781 to 2017; (ii) surveys on public support for constitutional duties a…
Social rights scapegoating
In Chile, many commentators, academics and political leaders have spent years arguing that the limited nature of the social rights in the national constitution is partially responsible for the country’s economic and social inequality. It is thus unsurprising that changing the scope of the country’s social rights was a major focus of the recently failed constitutional reform effort. However, we argue that the long-running claim that Chile’s social…
The Constitutionalization of Democracy
Recent decades have seen a sharp rise in constitutional provisions regulating core aspects of democracy, including the rules about parties, voting, and elections. The trend is apparent in both democracies and nondemocracies, although democracies tend to constitutionalize slightly more matters. Constitutionalization can help democracy by tying the hands of politicians. Looking at cross-national data, we find that constitutionalizing democracy is c…
Abusive Constitutional Borrowing: Legal Globalization and the Subversion of Liberal Democracy
Journal Article Abusive Constitutional Borrowing: Legal Globalization and the Subversion of Liberal Democracy Get access Rosalind Dixon & David Landau, Abusive Constitutional Borrowing: Legal Globalization and the Subversion of Liberal Democracy ( Oxford University Press, 2021) Mila Versteeg Mila Versteeg Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law, Charlottesville, VA, USA [email protected] Search for other works by this autho…
The Effect of Constitutional Gender Equality Clauses
In the past decades, clauses guaranteeing gender equality have become a common feature of national constitutions. During that time, de facto gender equality also noticeably improved globally. But it is not clear whether the two trends are related. We explore the relationship between constitutional gender equality clauses and de facto gender equality using three research methods: cross-country regressions exploring the relationship between constit…
Introduction: A Second Wave of Comparative Constitutional Studies
The Global Evolution of Foreign Relations Law
The constitutional rules that govern how states engage with international law have profound implications for foreign affairs, yet we lack comprehensive data on the choices countries make and their motivations. We draw on an original dataset that covers 108 countries over a nearly two-hundred-year period to map countries’ foreign relations law choices and trace their evolution. We find that legal origins and colonial legacies continue to account f…
Empirical Studies of Human Rights Law
A growing body of empirical studies has provided important insights into our understanding of the causes and effects of codified human rights. Yet empirical research has treated human rights treaties and constitutional rights as separate domains, even though the two regimes offer many of the same rights protections and can interact and reinforce each other. In this article, we review these two bodies of literature, focusing on two lines of inquir…
The Strength of Weak Review: National Courts, Interpretive Canons, and Human Rights Treaties
Enforcement of international law is often delegated to national courts, creating a space for them to play a part in international judicialization. Under what conditions can they do so? We argue that the answer depends on the relationship between the political and legal constraints national courts face. National courts must be careful to safeguard their independence in the face of potential backlash, but they face constraints in terms of the legal…
Comparative International Law
By definition, international law, once agreed upon and consented to, applies to all parties equally. It is perhaps the one area of law where cross-country comparison seems inappropriate, because all parties are governed by the same rules. However, as this book explains, states sometimes adhere to similar, and other times adopt different, interpretations of the same international norms and standards. International legal rules are not a monolithic …
Doing Away with Capital Punishment in Russia
The Russian Constitution protects the right to life. At the same time, it states that “capital punishment until its complete abolition may be established by federal law as an exclusive form of punishment for particularly grave crimes against life,” but only on the condition that an accused in a capital case shall be entitled to a trial by a court comprising professional judges and a lay jury (Article 20 (2)). This chapter will describe the uneasy…
The Interpretation of International Law by Domestic Courts: Uniformity, Diversity, Convergence
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Measuring the Rule of Law: A Comparison of Indicators
The rule of law era has given rise to multiple indicators purporting to measure the concept. This article compares four major indicators of the rule of law and shows that their approaches to conceptualization and measurement differ. Given their disparate conceptualizations and measurement strategies, one might expect a weak correlation between them. Strikingly, however, all four indicators are highly correlated with each other (with the pair-wise…
International law, constitutional law, and public support for torture
The human rights movement has spent considerable energy developing and promoting the adoption of both international and domestic legal prohibitions against torture. Empirical scholarship testing the effectiveness of these prohibitions using observational data, however, has produced mixed results. In this paper, we explore one possible mechanism through which these prohibitions may be effective: dampening public support for torture. Specifically, …
Do Constitutional Rights Make a Difference
Although the question of whether constitutional rights matter is of great theoretical and practical importance, little is known about whether constitutional rights impact government behavior. In this article, we test the effectiveness of six political rights. We hypothesize that a difference exists between organizational rights—most notably, the rights to unionize and form political parties—and individual rights. Specifically, we suggest that org…
Constitutions Unentrenched: Toward an Alternative Theory of Constitutional Design
T his article highlights a gap between a great deal of constitutional theory and a great deal of the practice of democratic constitution-making. Drawing on data from democratic national and state constitutions, we challenge the consensus among constitutional theorists that a central purpose of constitutionalism is the entrenchment (the fortification against future change) of broad principles. The empirical reality is that the majority of democrat…
Law versus Norms: The Impact of Human-Rights Treaties on National Bills of Rights
The constitutional incorporation of international human-rights law is often seen as one of the most powerful ways in which treaty norms can be enforced at the local level. This paper examines empirically if and how human-rights treaties alter rights commitments in national constitutions. Analyzing the adoption of 103 constitutional rights - only some of which are enshrined in treaties - in 188 countries over a sixty-one-year period, the paper fin…
Constitutions
Comparative International Law: Framing the Field
At first blush, “comparative international law” might sound like an oxymoron. In principle, international law—at least when it arises from multilateral treaties or general custom—applies equally to all parties or states. As a result, international lawyers often resist emphasizing local, national, or regional approaches due to the field’s aspirations to universality and uniformity. Comparativists, meanwhile, frequently overlook the potential to ap…
International Law in National Legal Systems: An Empirical Investigation
International legal scholars have long recognized the importance of the rules and processes by which states adhere to international legal obligations and “translate” them into their domestic legal systems. Research by political scientists on specific issue areas likewise increasingly recognizes that domestic implementation is crucial to international law compliance and effectiveness. Yet the lack of systematic data makes it difficult to assemble …
Sham Constitutions
Mobile phones in Africa: How Much Do We Really Know
Mobile phones are a crucial mode of communication and welfare enhancement in poor countries, especially those lacking an infrastructure of fixed lines. In recent years much has been written about how mobile telephony in Africa is rapidly reducing the digital divide with developed countries. Yet, when one examines the evidence it is not at all clear what is really happening. In one country, Tanzania, for example, some observers point to the fact t…
Do Constitutional Rights Make a Difference
Although the question of whether constitutional rights matter is of great theoretical and practical importance, little is known about whether constitutional rights impact government behavior. In this article, we test the effectiveness of six political rights. We hypothesize that a difference exists between organizational rights—most notably, the rights to unionize and form political parties—and individual rights. Specifically, we suggest that org…
International law, constitutional law, and public support for torture
The human rights movement has spent considerable energy developing and promoting the adoption of both international and domestic legal prohibitions against torture. Empirical scholarship testing the effectiveness of these prohibitions using observational data, however, has produced mixed results. In this paper, we explore one possible mechanism through which these prohibitions may be effective: dampening public support for torture. Specifically, …
Mobile phones in Africa: How Much Do We Really Know
Mobile phones are a crucial mode of communication and welfare enhancement in poor countries, especially those lacking an infrastructure of fixed lines. In recent years much has been written about how mobile telephony in Africa is rapidly reducing the digital divide with developed countries. Yet, when one examines the evidence it is not at all clear what is really happening. In one country, Tanzania, for example, some observers point to the fact t…
Measuring the Rule of Law: A Comparison of Indicators
The rule of law era has given rise to multiple indicators purporting to measure the concept. This article compares four major indicators of the rule of law and shows that their approaches to conceptualization and measurement differ. Given their disparate conceptualizations and measurement strategies, one might expect a weak correlation between them. Strikingly, however, all four indicators are highly correlated with each other (with the pair-wise…
Constitutions Unentrenched: Toward an Alternative Theory of Constitutional Design
T his article highlights a gap between a great deal of constitutional theory and a great deal of the practice of democratic constitution-making. Drawing on data from democratic national and state constitutions, we challenge the consensus among constitutional theorists that a central purpose of constitutionalism is the entrenchment (the fortification against future change) of broad principles. The empirical reality is that the majority of democrat…
International Law in National Legal Systems: An Empirical Investigation
International legal scholars have long recognized the importance of the rules and processes by which states adhere to international legal obligations and “translate” them into their domestic legal systems. Research by political scientists on specific issue areas likewise increasingly recognizes that domestic implementation is crucial to international law compliance and effectiveness. Yet the lack of systematic data makes it difficult to assemble …
Empirical Studies of Human Rights Law
A growing body of empirical studies has provided important insights into our understanding of the causes and effects of codified human rights. Yet empirical research has treated human rights treaties and constitutional rights as separate domains, even though the two regimes offer many of the same rights protections and can interact and reinforce each other. In this article, we review these two bodies of literature, focusing on two lines of inquir…
Comparative International Law: Framing the Field
At first blush, “comparative international law” might sound like an oxymoron. In principle, international law—at least when it arises from multilateral treaties or general custom—applies equally to all parties or states. As a result, international lawyers often resist emphasizing local, national, or regional approaches due to the field’s aspirations to universality and uniformity. Comparativists, meanwhile, frequently overlook the potential to ap…
The Strength of Weak Review: National Courts, Interpretive Canons, and Human Rights Treaties
Enforcement of international law is often delegated to national courts, creating a space for them to play a part in international judicialization. Under what conditions can they do so? We argue that the answer depends on the relationship between the political and legal constraints national courts face. National courts must be careful to safeguard their independence in the face of potential backlash, but they face constraints in terms of the legal…
The Interpretation of International Law by Domestic Courts: Uniformity, Diversity, Convergence
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Do constitutional unamendability rules make a difference
Leaders often try to amend constitutions to remove checks on their powers. To help protect against such democratic erosion, constitutional drafters and jurists sometimes restrict constitutional amendments by: (1) specifying in the constitutional text that certain clauses or principles can never be changed (“Eternity Clauses”); (2) granting apex courts the power to review the procedural validity of amendment processes (“Amendment Review”); or (3) …
Support for Constitutional Rights During Crisis: Evidence from the Pandemic
During times of crisis, governments often consider policies that may promote safety, but that would require overstepping constitutionally protected rights. These policies are frequently adopted by the executive, permitted by the courts and legislative branches, and appear to be supported by the public. But it is not apparent whether the public is less supportive of these policies than they would otherwise be because of these constitutional rules.…
Social rights scapegoating
In Chile, many commentators, academics and political leaders have spent years arguing that the limited nature of the social rights in the national constitution is partially responsible for the country’s economic and social inequality. It is thus unsurprising that changing the scope of the country’s social rights was a major focus of the recently failed constitutional reform effort. However, we argue that the long-running claim that Chile’s social…
The Constitutionalization of Democracy
Recent decades have seen a sharp rise in constitutional provisions regulating core aspects of democracy, including the rules about parties, voting, and elections. The trend is apparent in both democracies and nondemocracies, although democracies tend to constitutionalize slightly more matters. Constitutionalization can help democracy by tying the hands of politicians. Looking at cross-national data, we find that constitutionalizing democracy is c…
Abusive Constitutional Borrowing: Legal Globalization and the Subversion of Liberal Democracy
Journal Article Abusive Constitutional Borrowing: Legal Globalization and the Subversion of Liberal Democracy Get access Rosalind Dixon & David Landau, Abusive Constitutional Borrowing: Legal Globalization and the Subversion of Liberal Democracy ( Oxford University Press, 2021) Mila Versteeg Mila Versteeg Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law, Charlottesville, VA, USA [email protected] Search for other works by this autho…
Mobile phones in Africa: How Much Do We Really Know
Mobile phones are a crucial mode of communication and welfare enhancement in poor countries, especially those lacking an infrastructure of fixed lines. In recent years much has been written about how mobile telephony in Africa is rapidly reducing the digital divide with developed countries. Yet, when one examines the evidence it is not at all clear what is really happening. In one country, Tanzania, for example, some observers point to the fact t…
Sham Constitutions
Law versus Norms: The Impact of Human-Rights Treaties on National Bills of Rights
The constitutional incorporation of international human-rights law is often seen as one of the most powerful ways in which treaty norms can be enforced at the local level. This paper examines empirically if and how human-rights treaties alter rights commitments in national constitutions. Analyzing the adoption of 103 constitutional rights - only some of which are enshrined in treaties - in 188 countries over a sixty-one-year period, the paper fin…
Constitutions
Comparative International Law: Framing the Field
At first blush, “comparative international law” might sound like an oxymoron. In principle, international law—at least when it arises from multilateral treaties or general custom—applies equally to all parties or states. As a result, international lawyers often resist emphasizing local, national, or regional approaches due to the field’s aspirations to universality and uniformity. Comparativists, meanwhile, frequently overlook the potential to ap…
International Law in National Legal Systems: An Empirical Investigation
International legal scholars have long recognized the importance of the rules and processes by which states adhere to international legal obligations and “translate” them into their domestic legal systems. Research by political scientists on specific issue areas likewise increasingly recognizes that domestic implementation is crucial to international law compliance and effectiveness. Yet the lack of systematic data makes it difficult to assemble …
Measuring the Rule of Law: A Comparison of Indicators
The rule of law era has given rise to multiple indicators purporting to measure the concept. This article compares four major indicators of the rule of law and shows that their approaches to conceptualization and measurement differ. Given their disparate conceptualizations and measurement strategies, one might expect a weak correlation between them. Strikingly, however, all four indicators are highly correlated with each other (with the pair-wise…
International law, constitutional law, and public support for torture
The human rights movement has spent considerable energy developing and promoting the adoption of both international and domestic legal prohibitions against torture. Empirical scholarship testing the effectiveness of these prohibitions using observational data, however, has produced mixed results. In this paper, we explore one possible mechanism through which these prohibitions may be effective: dampening public support for torture. Specifically, …
Do Constitutional Rights Make a Difference
Although the question of whether constitutional rights matter is of great theoretical and practical importance, little is known about whether constitutional rights impact government behavior. In this article, we test the effectiveness of six political rights. We hypothesize that a difference exists between organizational rights—most notably, the rights to unionize and form political parties—and individual rights. Specifically, we suggest that org…
Constitutions Unentrenched: Toward an Alternative Theory of Constitutional Design
T his article highlights a gap between a great deal of constitutional theory and a great deal of the practice of democratic constitution-making. Drawing on data from democratic national and state constitutions, we challenge the consensus among constitutional theorists that a central purpose of constitutionalism is the entrenchment (the fortification against future change) of broad principles. The empirical reality is that the majority of democrat…
The Interpretation of International Law by Domestic Courts: Uniformity, Diversity, Convergence
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Comparative International Law
By definition, international law, once agreed upon and consented to, applies to all parties equally. It is perhaps the one area of law where cross-country comparison seems inappropriate, because all parties are governed by the same rules. However, as this book explains, states sometimes adhere to similar, and other times adopt different, interpretations of the same international norms and standards. International legal rules are not a monolithic …
Doing Away with Capital Punishment in Russia
The Russian Constitution protects the right to life. At the same time, it states that “capital punishment until its complete abolition may be established by federal law as an exclusive form of punishment for particularly grave crimes against life,” but only on the condition that an accused in a capital case shall be entitled to a trial by a court comprising professional judges and a lay jury (Article 20 (2)). This chapter will describe the uneasy…
Empirical Studies of Human Rights Law
A growing body of empirical studies has provided important insights into our understanding of the causes and effects of codified human rights. Yet empirical research has treated human rights treaties and constitutional rights as separate domains, even though the two regimes offer many of the same rights protections and can interact and reinforce each other. In this article, we review these two bodies of literature, focusing on two lines of inquir…
The Strength of Weak Review: National Courts, Interpretive Canons, and Human Rights Treaties
Enforcement of international law is often delegated to national courts, creating a space for them to play a part in international judicialization. Under what conditions can they do so? We argue that the answer depends on the relationship between the political and legal constraints national courts face. National courts must be careful to safeguard their independence in the face of potential backlash, but they face constraints in terms of the legal…
The Effect of Constitutional Gender Equality Clauses
In the past decades, clauses guaranteeing gender equality have become a common feature of national constitutions. During that time, de facto gender equality also noticeably improved globally. But it is not clear whether the two trends are related. We explore the relationship between constitutional gender equality clauses and de facto gender equality using three research methods: cross-country regressions exploring the relationship between constit…
Introduction: A Second Wave of Comparative Constitutional Studies
The Global Evolution of Foreign Relations Law
The constitutional rules that govern how states engage with international law have profound implications for foreign affairs, yet we lack comprehensive data on the choices countries make and their motivations. We draw on an original dataset that covers 108 countries over a nearly two-hundred-year period to map countries’ foreign relations law choices and trace their evolution. We find that legal origins and colonial legacies continue to account f…
Social rights scapegoating
In Chile, many commentators, academics and political leaders have spent years arguing that the limited nature of the social rights in the national constitution is partially responsible for the country’s economic and social inequality. It is thus unsurprising that changing the scope of the country’s social rights was a major focus of the recently failed constitutional reform effort. However, we argue that the long-running claim that Chile’s social…
The Constitutionalization of Democracy
Recent decades have seen a sharp rise in constitutional provisions regulating core aspects of democracy, including the rules about parties, voting, and elections. The trend is apparent in both democracies and nondemocracies, although democracies tend to constitutionalize slightly more matters. Constitutionalization can help democracy by tying the hands of politicians. Looking at cross-national data, we find that constitutionalizing democracy is c…
Abusive Constitutional Borrowing: Legal Globalization and the Subversion of Liberal Democracy
Journal Article Abusive Constitutional Borrowing: Legal Globalization and the Subversion of Liberal Democracy Get access Rosalind Dixon & David Landau, Abusive Constitutional Borrowing: Legal Globalization and the Subversion of Liberal Democracy ( Oxford University Press, 2021) Mila Versteeg Mila Versteeg Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law, Charlottesville, VA, USA [email protected] Search for other works by this autho…
Support for Constitutional Rights During Crisis: Evidence from the Pandemic
During times of crisis, governments often consider policies that may promote safety, but that would require overstepping constitutionally protected rights. These policies are frequently adopted by the executive, permitted by the courts and legislative branches, and appear to be supported by the public. But it is not apparent whether the public is less supportive of these policies than they would otherwise be because of these constitutional rules.…
Constitutional Duties
Individual duties—like the responsibility to defend the country, pay taxes, or obey the law—are frequently included in national constitutions, but they are rarely analyzed. This paper empirically examines the origins, evolution, and implications of individual duties in national constitutions using three data sources: (i) a new dataset of duties in national constitutions from 1781 to 2017; (ii) surveys on public support for constitutional duties a…
Crises of Authority
Constitutional scholars have long observed that the term “constitutional crisis” is overused. Pundits and scholars routinely use it to describe constitutional developments that they view as normatively undesirable. But doing so may hurt our ability to recognize them. We use a comparative and historical perspective to call attention to the worst-case scenario of constitutional breakdown. This scenario, which we will refer to as a “constitutional c…
Do constitutional unamendability rules make a difference
Leaders often try to amend constitutions to remove checks on their powers. To help protect against such democratic erosion, constitutional drafters and jurists sometimes restrict constitutional amendments by: (1) specifying in the constitutional text that certain clauses or principles can never be changed (“Eternity Clauses”); (2) granting apex courts the power to review the procedural validity of amendment processes (“Amendment Review”); or (3) …
Political science (22 works) · Law (21 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Law (14 works) · Law and economics (14 works) · Judicial and Constitutional Studies (13 works) · Politics (12 works) · Economics (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Constitution (6 works)