Constitutions as Social Worlds: Reflections on The Palimpsest Constitution

Suhail Rashid Bhat

a Lawyer and a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Law & Justice, the University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia.

I should begin with a small confession. I am a lawyer by training, and I still instinctively approach questions of law through fairly conventional legal lenses. My first questions are usually: What does the law say? What institutions matter? What doctrinal arguments are available?

So, when I picked up Melissa Crouch’s The Palimpsest Constitution, I expected, perhaps naively, a book about constitutions. And do not get me wrong, of course, it is.

But one of the pleasures of reading the book is that it constantly escapes the boundaries of what I had expected a constitutional law book to be. We encounter archives, classrooms, museums, political movements, constitutional conversations, personal histories, and sites of memory. There are even photographs. Rather than treating these things simply as context surrounding constitutional law, the book asks us to take seriously what Crouch calls ‘constitutions in societies’, constitutions as social phenomena whose meanings are produced, contested and sustained within social life (pp. 9, 18-22, 217).

One detail in particular stayed with me. The first photographs in the Introduction are not of constitutional texts, constitutional assemblies or constitutional courts. They are of people. We meet the lawyer U Ko Ni, and later Professor Tin Aung Aye (pp. 2, 23). In Chapter 10, the Conclusion, Crouch returns us to U Ko Ni, this time through a photograph of his grave site (p. 216).

That may initially seem like a small stylistic choice. I do not think it is. The visual choices seem to embody the book’s larger methodological commitment. Constitutional life is carried through people, relationships, memories, objects and struggles, not simply through documents. This is consistent with Crouch’s own account of constitutional ethnography. Photographs, buildings, speeches, jokes and other materials can be read alongside constitutional texts and judicial decisions as ‘social texts’ through which constitutional legacies are assembled and reassembled (p. 243).

Crouch’s approach resonated strongly with me because the central question animating my own research is not entirely different. My work examines people’s tribunals and what I describe as jurisprudence from the margins. At its core lies a fairly simple question: where does legal meaning come from? More specifically, I am interested in how legal meaning is produced outside formally authorised institutions, and how actors without delegated adjudicative authority nevertheless participate in legal interpretation, argument and judgment.

Reading The Palimpsest Constitution, I found myself asking an analogous question. If constitutional meaning is not produced exclusively in courts, legislatures and constitutional texts, where does it come from?

One of the book’s answers, as I read it, is from social life. Constitutional meaning emerges through archives, commemorations, classrooms, workshops, political movements and everyday constitutional conversations. Crouch’s ‘living archive’, for example, extends beyond official repositories to the continuing life of historical documents and artefacts and to the ways people interpret the past in the present (pp. 8-9, 241). The questions put to her by participants in workshops and by interlocutors during fieldwork themselves became a source of insight into how people engaged with constitutions past and present (pp. 22, 241).

Constitutions can therefore survive socially beyond the formal legal life of their texts. They survive because people continue to remember them, invoke them, reject them, repurpose them and imagine alternatives through them. Indeed, one of the book’s broader claims is that past state and non-state constitutions may be affirmed, rejected or repurposed in contemporary struggles, so that ‘constitutions past are never quite past’ (pp. 8-9, 216-7, 231).

For me, this shifts constitutional inquiry in an important way. The book invites us to move from thinking about constitutions primarily as legal documents towards understanding them as social phenomena. The question becomes not simply ‘what does a constitution mean?’, but ‘how does a constitution live within society?’

That shift also has important implications for how we think comparatively.. It shifts our attention away from constitutions as documents and towards constitutions as lived social practice. For those of us working across South and Southeast Asia, this is especially productive. Contexts such as Myanmar, Kashmir, West Papua and Sri Lanka are obviously distinct. Their histories are not interchangeable and should not be collapsed into a single postcolonial narrative. Yet questions of militarisation, political belonging and contested futures recur across these settings in different forms.

What I found useful in Crouch’s account is that constitutional legacies provide a way of thinking across such differences without requiring them to disappear. The point is not to extract a universal constitutional model from Myanmar. Crouch herself presents Myanmar as a case through which to demonstrate Southeast Asia’s comparative relevance, and later invites readers to think with the palimpsest constitution in other contexts, times and places (pp. 18, 217). Comparison can therefore become a means of asking how different societies inherit, contest and repurpose legal and constitutional pasts, while remaining attentive to what is particular to each history.

Finally, I want to say something about the book’s Appendix on constitutional ethnography, because I think it does considerably more than simply explain methods. Crouch describes constitutional ethnography as an effort to reconnect constitutions to their social context and to a humanistic understanding of their social life in the post-colony (p. 239). That commitment changes what counts as relevant material, but it also changes the relationship between the researcher and the research.

The Appendix is unusually candid about that relationship. Research in an authoritarian setting raises questions of risk, responsibility, access and care. Crouch describes withholding names, experiences and details where their inclusion might place others at risk, and explicitly understands this as an ongoing ‘ethics of care and responsibility’ (p. 240). Later, reflecting on ethnographic writing itself, she confronts the problem of representation. Who gets to represent whom, and how? Her use of narrative drawn from field notes and photography is deliberate. Narrative is not offered as mere anecdote but as a method of analysis and argument, capable of bringing the reader into the social worlds within which constitutional meaning is made (pp. 246-7).

As someone who still often feels more comfortable describing himself as a lawyer than as an academic, I found that both refreshing and reassuring. It reminds us that scholarly knowledge is not produced from nowhere. Our choices about where we look, whom we listen to, what we record, what we leave out, and how we write are themselves part of the production of knowledge.

Perhaps, then, the central insight I take from The Palimpsest Constitution is that constitutions are not simply texts that govern societies. They are also social worlds that people inhabit, contest, remember and remake.

For constitutional lawyers, the book is an invitation to reconsider where constitutional life is located and who participates in producing its meaning. For sociolegal scholars, it is a compelling demonstration of what becomes visible when we study constitutions in societies rather than constitutions in isolation from them.

Suhail Rashid Bhat is a Lawyer and a PhD Candidate at the Faculty of Law & Justice, the University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia.

Suggested citation: Suhail Rashid Bhat, ‘Constitutions as Social Worlds: Reflections on The Palimpsest Constitution’ (IACL-AIDC Blog, 29 October 2026). https://blog-iacl-aidc.org/2026-posts/2026/10/29/constitutions-as-social-worlds-reflections-on-the-palimpsest-constitution