International Regionalism and National Constitutions: A Jurimetric Assessment

Essential Medicines in National Constitutions

A constitutional guarantee of access to essential medicines has been identified as an important indicator of government commitment to the progressive realization of the right to the highest attainable standard of health. The objective of this study was to evaluate provisions on access to essential medicines in national constitutions, to identify comprehensive examples of constitutional text on ...

Global Survey of National Constitutions

General Comment No. 22, issued in 2016 by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR), clarifies states’ legal duties to respect, protect, and fulfill the right to sexual and reproductive health (SRH). Our study analyzes domestic constitutions around the world to investigate whether and to what extent the right to sexual and reproductive health is respected, protected, and ful...

The Endurance of National Constitutions

The cultural evolution of national constitutions

We explore how ideas from infectious disease and genetics can be used to uncover patterns of cultural inheritance and innovation in a corpus of 591 national constitutions spanning 1789–2008. Legal “ideas” are encoded as “topics”—words statistically linked in documents—derived from topic modeling the corpus of constitutions. Using these topics we derive a diffusion network for borrowing from anc...

Access to essential medicines in national constitutions.

Access to essential medicines is well founded in international law as part of the right to the highest attainable standard of health (" the right to health "). The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights adopted in 1966 calls for States Parties to take steps to ensure access to medical services for all. General Comment 14, added in the year 2000, applies the principles of...