Relatedly, there is likely to be exciting research done on the relationship betweenconstitutions and the mediation of ethnic conXict. On this subject, the American
lens through which this chapter has been written is concededly too narrow. The
group of Americans who drafted, debated, and enjoyed authority to help ratify the
United States Constitution were a relatively homogeneous bunch. Although the
Constitution would prove to have profound consequences for Native Americans
and for African-Americans, there was no thought given in 1787 to ‘‘power sharing’’
with either. By contrast, power sharing in ethnically divided states is perhaps the
paramount challenge facing drafters of new constitutions in the twenty-Wrst
century. There is deep debate over the appeal of what has come to be known as
‘‘consociational democracy,’’ namely, some form of constitutional arrangement in
which diVerent ethnic groups share executive power proportionally, enjoy substan-
tial group autonomy, and rely on consensus for a signiWcant portion of government
decision-making (compare Lijphart 2002 with Horowitz 2002 ). Such decisions
could be classed, if we follow the list of functions noted above, as ‘‘implementing
key founding bargains,’’ but the relationship of constitutionalism to interethnic
cooperation is so complex a subject that a much moreWne-grained picture of
constitutional elements would be necessary to do justice to it.
A third project, fed by theWrst two, is likely to be an intensiWcation of interest in
the relationship between constitutionalism and democratic theory. The global
proliferation of new constitutional activity, on both the national and the
supranational level (consider the European Union), coincides with the rapid
growth of interactive information and communications technologies that can
conceivably facilitate wholly novel institutional forms and processes through
which citizens may engage with one another and with the state in relation to public
policy-making (Shane 2004 b). Researchers are only beginning to explore the
implications of these new technologies for democratic theory and practice, and it
is easy enough to predict that ongoing developments in democratic theory and
constitutional design will cross-pollinate signiWcantly over the coming decades.
A fourth project of continuing interest is likely to be the eVort, noted at the
outset of this chapter, to synthesize internal and external accounts of constitutional
interpretation to provide a more fully eVective model than either can provide alone
(Feldman 2005 ). The increasing interest among law faculties in interdisciplinary
inquiry, accompanied by the increasing receptiveness among political scientists to
accounts of judicial behavior more nuanced than the pure attitudinal model,
should help accelerate this development.
Fifth, and related to the growth of interdisciplinary inquiry, we are likely to see a
greater role for cognitive and decision psychology in exploring how legal actors
fulWll their roles. Research on bias, attitudes, and stereotypes is likely to inform
debates about how judges interpret the law and whether there exist structures,
processes, or techniques eVective in limiting the role of individual bias in legal
interpretation (Ferguson, Babcock, and Shane 2005 ). Similarly, given the signiWcant
analyzing constitutions 211