ABOUT
Constitutional and political systems are increasingly understood not only through their formal, codified rules, but through the informal practices, unwritten conventions, and tacit norms that shape institutional behavior in practice.
The group provides a dedicated forum for scholars working at this intersection, bringing together comparative lawyers, political scientists, and socio-legal researchers who engage with informality and unwritten law as analytical concepts in their own right.
The group’s scope is deliberately broad. While courts remain a central site of inquiry – given their pivotal role in interpreting, enforcing, and at times circumventing unwritten norms – the group equally welcomes scholarship on prosecutors, legislatures, fourth-branch institutions, and other constitutional actors whose conduct is governed as much by convention and informal expectation as by positive law.