Other CONREASON Projects outside Northern Europe

The parent project: The first CONREASON project

The Nordic CONREASON project uses the methodology elaborated by the CONREASON project, which ran between 2011 and 2016 (funded by the German Volkswagen Stiftung), coordinated by András Jakab, Arthur Dyevre and Giulio Itzcovich. The CONREASON project examined the reason-giving practice of 18 courts in constitutional cases from all over the world: seven supreme courts, nine constitutional courts and the two European regional courts. None of the examined courts represented, however, the Nordic countries.

The principal output of the project was the volume Comparative Constitutional Reasoning, published in 2017 by Cambridge University Press, including all country reports and the comparative analysis. The entire dataset of the project is available open access: sample judgments, case notes and expert opinions are available on the publisher’s website, while statistical data and analyses are available in the open archive of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.

For a review essay by the Nordic CONREASON project’s principal investigator see: Katalin Kelemen, Constitutional reasoning: A flourishing field of research in comparative law (2019) 17 International Journal of Constitutional Law 1336-1344.

A sister project: The CORE Latam project

The first regional follow-up of the CONREASON project, the CORE Latam Project, was launched in Latin America in 2018, headed by Johanna Fröhlich at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. This project examines the reason-giving practice of 15 Latin American jurisdictions, including the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Caribbean Commonwealth. The CORE Latam project also relies on the methodology of the first CONREASON project, while adapting it to the Latin American constitutional context.

For more details see the CORE Latam project’s website. The first preliminary results of the project were published by its principal investigator on the I-CONnect Blog: Johanna Fröhlich, Traces of Constitutional Reasoning in Latin America and the Caribbean – Regional Cosmopolitanism Without Backlash? Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, Jul. 30, 2020.

The principal investigators of both the first CONREASON project and the CORE Latam project are members of the Advisory Board of the Nordic CONREASON project.