Sociology of Constitutions as a Comparative Study of Legal Cultures: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives for the Analysis of Constitutional Cultures: The USA and Poland

Constitutions provide a complex cultural object for socio-legal studies that cannot be adequately described in terms of a normative order alone. The potentials for the comparative study of legal cultures resulting from this have not been sufficiently exploited by either comparative law or the sociology of law. Against this background, the paper presents a general outline of a comparative sociology of constitutions as part of a sociology of legal cultures. As a first step, an analytical model is developed that embraces the multidimensionality and diversity of the subject by distinguishing between the normative-semantic, symbolic-epistemic, practical-discursive and organisational-sociostructural dimensions of constitutional cultures. This model is then applied to the US and the Polish cases. The paper closes with remarks on the logics and heuristic utility of the model.