Introduction

This introductory article first sets out the book's purpose, which is to provide an overview of the current status of comparative constitutional law as a discipline and an accounting of fundamental constitutional developments, concepts, and debates as they emerge through the lenses of that discipline. The article is organized as follows. Section I provides a brief overview of the history of comparative constitutional law. Section II focuses on the uses and purposes of, and the challenges confronting, comparative constitutional law. Section III addresses preliminarily the key issue of transplantation of institutions and norms from one constitutional system to the next. Section IV discusses in summary fashion some of the most salient methodological issues that have an important bearing on work in comparative constitutional law. Finally, Section V accounts for the structure and organization of the Handbook and briefly situates each of its nine parts in the context of the project as a whole.