—Pamela Juliana Aguirre Castro, constitutional law professor and Director of the Legal and Social Observatory at Universidad Espíritu Santo (UEES), Ecuador. pjaguirre@uees.edu.ec
How is a constitution actually made? Not the finished text that courts and scholars later interpret, but the messy, human process that produces it: the negotiations, the drafting sessions, the compromises reached late at night between delegates who disagree on almost everything. That process was the subject of the Oxford Summer Seminar in Constitutional Process and Design, held at Pembroke and Trinity Colleges, University of Oxford, from 3 to 14 August 2026, and I had the privilege of taking part in it.
The seminar is part of the Quill Project, the Oxford-based research initiative that has spent the past decade modelling and visualizing the negotiations behind foundational legal texts, beginning with the United States Constitutional Convention of 1787. Quill’s central insight, that constitutions are best understood as the product of formal negotiation processes rather than as static documents runs through the entire program. Over two weeks, that insight was turned into practice.
The design and the designers
The seminar was designed by an exceptional group of scholars and practitioners: Nicholas Cole, Senior Research Fellow at Pembroke College and Director of the Quill Project; Lorianne Updike Schulzke, Visiting Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Yale Law School; Zachary Elkins, Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas and co-director of the Comparative Constitutions Project; Jason Gluck, who served as Constitutional Focal Point at the United Nations Development Programme from 2013 to 2026; and Christina Murray, Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Cape Town, whose experience advising constitutional processes around the world brought the realities of the field into the classroom.
The combination mattered. It is rare to sit in a seminar room where the history of the Philadelphia Convention, large-N empirical findings on constitutional endurance, and first-hand accounts of United Nations mediation are all on the table at once. The faculty did not always agree with one another, on the value of secrecy in negotiations, for instance, or on how much design can really be transplanted across contexts, and those disagreements were among the most instructive moments of the program.
From theory to the negotiating table
The curriculum moved deliberately from theory to practice. The first days were devoted to deliberative democracy and the theory of multi-party negotiation, how agendas are set, how coalitions form, how procedural rules shape substantive outcomes, and why the sequence of decisions can matter as much as the decisions themselves. We then turned to constitutional design proper, executive structure, federalism and devolution, rights and their enforcement, amendment rules, drawing heavily on comparative evidence about which arrangements endure and which collapse.
What sets this seminar apart, however, is that participants do not merely study constitution-making; they do it. The second week was organized around a simulated constitutional convention in which we applied what we had learned to negotiate and draft a complete constitution, working with Quill’s constitution-writing software to record proposals, amendments, and votes in real time. Sitting as delegates, we experienced firsthand how quickly abstract commitments to deliberation are tested by time pressure, strategic behavior, and honest disagreement, and how procedural choices we had discussed as theory the week before suddenly became decisive.
Comparative law, practiced rather than described
For anyone who works in comparative constitutional law, the seminar offered something that books and databases cannot: the discipline practiced in real time. Participants came from Israel, Ukraine, India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Australia, Peru, Egypt, Georgia, Namibia, the United States, Puerto Rico, Austria, Fiji and Ecuador. Comparison, in that setting, stopped being a method applied to distant case studies and became a daily necessity. To argue for a particular design of the executive, or for one model of judicial review over another, each of us had to make our own tradition intelligible to colleagues who did not share it, to explain not only what our constitutions say, but why, and at what cost. There is no better test of how well one truly understands one’s own legal system than the attempt to justify it to a room that takes nothing about it for granted.
When a colleague from Ukraine speaks about constitutional continuity under wartime conditions, or a participant from Bangladesh reflects on the demands of a transitional moment, the comparative exercise gains a weight it rarely has on paper. For those of us from Latin America, our region’s dense experience with constitution-making and constitutional replacement became a constant point of reference: examined, questioned, and sometimes challenged by perspectives from other traditions.
Working together on a single constitutional project revealed just how deep those differences run. Drafting a constitution with delegates trained in common law and civil law, in secular and religiously grounded systems, in old federations and young unitary states, is a true intercultural challenge, and that is precisely its value. Our disagreements were rarely about drafting technique; they were about underlying assumptions we did not know we held. What one delegate treated as an obvious guarantee, another saw as a dangerous rigidity; what one considered a neutral procedural rule, another recognized as a choice with distributive consequences. Negotiating through those differences demanded more than legal knowledge. It required listening, translating between legal cultures, and building trust with people whose starting points were very far from our own. The constitution we produced was less important than what producing it taught us, that constitutional design is, at bottom, an exercise in understanding others.
This is why simulations of this kind deserve a larger place in legal education and in the training of those who advise real constitutional processes. Constitution-making is a craft, and like any craft it cannot be learned from texts alone. Exercises like the Oxford seminar teach what no treatise can, how procedure shapes substance, how agreement is actually built across profound difference, and how much of comparative law is ultimately about people rather than provisions. I left Oxford with a drafted constitution, a long reading list, and a renewed conviction that those of us who study constitutions must also practice the difficult, intercultural work of making them. I hope future editions of the seminar will find many more delegates willing to try.
Suggested citation: Pamela Juliana Aguirre Castro, A Review of the Oxford Summer Seminar in Constitutional Process and Design, Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, Oct. 1, 2026, at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/a-review-of-the-oxford-summer-seminar-in-constitutional-process-and-design/