Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-26-2026

Abstract

Constitutional scholarship has traditionally focused on formal constitutional actors: courts, legislatures, and executives. These actors are often regarded as primary sources of constitutional law, or in some cases, as final arbiters of constitutional meaning. More peripheral in this literature are actors thought to transmit what courts and high officials have established. These constitutional educators, including law professors, legal journalists, and civics planners, are often overlooked for defensible reasons: They lack the normative authorities of formal institutional actors, and they do not exercise power as it is often understood in public law.

This Article advances a general theory of constitutional education to show what is possible through centering the output of constitutional educators. In an age of global constitutional change and local constitutional upheaval, constitutional education can shed light on basic questions of constitutional order. The analytic value of constitutional education lies not in studying it in isolation, but from examining how primary constitutional research subjects—texts, ideas, methods, decisions, and reasons—are refracted through a distinct set of downstream epistemic actors. Focusing on two case studies, the United States and China, this Article shows how the study of constitutional education can illuminate the functions of authoritarian constitutions, the construction of constitutional culture, and the dynamics of constitutional change. In so arguing, this Article suggests that certain constitutional patterns may transcend divisions between autocracy and democracy, constitutions and constitutionalism.

Publication Citation

Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, Vol. 64, Pp. 573-640.

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