Constitutional Paradigms and the Stability of States

This book examines the influence of constitutional legal paradigms upon the political stability and viability of states. It contributes to the literature in the field by focussing on how constitutional flexibility may have led to the rise of 'successful' states and to the decline of 'unsuccessful' states, by promoting stability. Divided into two parts, the book considers theories of the rise and fall of civilizations and individual states, explains the concept of hard and soft constitutions and applies this concept to different types of state models. A series of international case studies in the second part of the book identifies the key dynamics in legal, political and economic history and includes the UK, US, New Zealand and Eastern Europe.

Noel Cox holds the position of Head of the Department of Law and Criminology at Aberystwyth University. He was Professor of Constitutional Law at the Auckland University of Technology to 2010, and was Head of the Department of Law 2004a€“2008. He received the Vice-Chancellor's Excellence Award for Research, in 2002. He spent the summer of 2003a€“2004 as a Visiting Fellow, Faculty of Law, The Australian National University, Canberra, and the latter part of 2006 at Wolfson College, the University of Cambridge. He was elected a Visiting Fellow at St Edmund's College, the University of Cambridge, in 2009.