The Possibilities of Comparative Constitutional Law

learning from our "offspring."But precisely how can we go about learning?Scholars in the field of general comparative law have paid a great deal of attention to similar questions. 7Some of the best work in the field suggests skepticism about any direct "borrowing" of solutions developed in one system to resolve problems in another!One version of the difficulty is this: Comparative study is sometimes said to allow a person embedded in one system to gain some distance from it. 9Having become intellectually estranged from that system, one can then see that seemingly unchangeable arrangements actually might be altered without substantial loss and sometimes with substantial gain. 10Familiar arrangements seem necessary to us, but comparative study demonstrates that they might be false necessities.And yet the estrangement, the sense that particular arrangements might indeed be false necessities, could be misleading.Some think that comparative study is worth little if it consists of yanking something that seems useful out of one system in which it is embedded and inserting it into another."Put another way, we might begin by believing that certain arrangements are necessary, then have that belief displaced by comparative study into thinking them false necessities, only to learn, on deeper relevance to broader issues of constitutional theory is Bruce Ackerman, The Rise of World Constitutionalism, 83 VA.L. REV.771 (1997), which notes, with the author's typical exuberance, that "the global transformation has not yet had the slightest impact on American constitutional thought."Id. at 772.Much here turns on the definition of "American constitutional thought."