Tracing Informal Constitutional Change – TRACE
TRACE develops computational methods to identify informal constitutional change in court decisions. Focusing on the Turkish Constitutional Court, the project studies how constitutional meaning shifts over time without formal amendment.
TRACE investigates how constitutional meaning changes when the text of the constitution remains formally the same. The project combines constitutional theory, comparative judicial politics and computational text analysis to trace long-term semantic shifts in the case law of the Turkish Constitutional Court. It develops transparent and reusable methods for studying how courts adapt constitutional concepts under changing political conditions. “The project asks how we can observe constitutional change when it happens through judicial language rather than formal amendment,” says Erdem Demirtaş.
The project focuses on informal constitutional change in constitutional adjudication. It examines whether and how key constitutional concepts – such as secularism, rights and separation of powers – change meaning across different political periods. Methodologically, TRACE uses legal-domain language models, static and contextual embeddings, validation exercises and robustness tests to detect semantic change in judicial decisions. The Turkish Constitutional Court provides the main empirical case, while the broader ambition is to develop methods that can be applied to other constitutional courts.
TRACE uses computational text analysis to study legal meaning over time. It compares static and contextual embeddings, evaluates semantic stability and change, and combines quantitative diagnostics with legal interpretation. The aim is not to replace doctrinal analysis, but to make long-term shifts in constitutional language visible, testable and comparable.
TRACE will produce academic articles, an open research dataset, methodological documentation and policy-relevant insights on constitutional courts under political pressure. The project is designed as a bridge between constitutional law, comparative politics and artificial intelligence for legal research.
Researchers
| Name | Title | Phone | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Demirtas, Abdullah Erdem | Postdoc Marie Curie | +4535334729 | |
| Krunke, Helle | Head of Centre, Professor | +4535324382 |
Funding
The project is funded by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Postdoctoral Fellowship, European Union.
Project period: 2025-2027
PI: Erdem Demirtaş