Writing While Quarantined: A Personal Interpretation of Contemporary Comparative Constitutional Law

Abstract This Essay is a personal reflection on the state of scholarship in the field of comparative constitutional law. I draw parallels between the development of and reaction to ‘critical perspectives’ on domestic US comparative constitutional law today. I argue that the parallels have similar political roots, in concern that critical perspectives undermine the ability of constitutional law, whether domestic or comparative, to resist conservative and antiliberal tendencies. I conclude with some speculations about the source of the political commitments by scholars of comparative constitutional law, and in particular about the way the field’s overall cosmopolitanism affects scholarship on anti-cosmopolitan populisms.