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Copyrighted Material Introduction Constitutional Boundaries JEFFREY K. TULIS AND STEPHEN MACEDO Our large theme is failure and success in constitution making, or the limits of constitutional democracy. The convergence of recent scholarly work in political science and law and political events throughout the world make this a timely project inside and outside of the academy. The number of new constitutional texts written in support of regime forma- tion in the past thirty years is astonishing. The profusion of ideas and scholarship on constitution making also marks a milestone for social science, which had long neglected the study of laws and constitutions, and for legal studies, which recently added the study of constitutional design to its usual emphasis on constitutional interpretation and analyses of court doctrine. This worldwide effort in political and academic arenas is, however, marked by a kind of ambivalence. On the one hand, there is considerable optimism that constitutional democracy represents a high point, if not a culmination, in the history of political life. The attractiveness of this political idea is so powerful that even countries such as Russia, whose long anticonstitutional pedigree continues to shape politics as it is expe- rienced there, claim to be constitutional democracies. On the other hand, for all the attractiveness of the idea of constitutional democracy, estab- lishing it in practice has proved dificult in many new regimes throughout the world, as the Russian case and the conlicts in Iraq and Afghanistan vividly illustrate. Constitutional democracy is at once an attractive idea and a daunting enterprise. There are limits to the possible establishment, to say nothing of the lourishing, of the idea of constitutional democracy. This book takes up the concern about the limits of constitutional democracy by re