Universal Human Rights and Constitutional Change

Scholars have written volumes about the dramatic constitutional changes that occurred in the United States in the decades after World War II. Several leading scholarly accounts adopt an internal perspective, focusing primarily on domestic factors that drove constitutional change. Other scholars adopt a more transnational perspective, linking domestic constitutional change in the United States to Cold War politics, or to the rise of totalitarianism. This Article builds on the work of scholars like Mary Dudziak and Richard Primus who have emphasized the transnational factors that contributed to constitutional change in the United States.

However, our account differs from both Dudziak and Primus because we emphasize that constitutional change in the United States from 1948 to 1976 should be understood in the context of the global human rights revolution that occurred during the same time frame.