Small State Constitutionalism: Introduction to the Symposium

Elisabeth Perham, Rosalind Dixon and Maartje De Visser

Elisabeth Perham is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney.
Rosalind Dixon is Scientia Professor and Anthony Mason Professor of Law at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney.
Maartje De Visser is Professor of Law at the Yong Pung How School of Law and College of Integrative Studies, Singapore Management University.

It is well-known that there has been a strong tendency in comparative constitutional studies scholarship to focus on the same few jurisdictions, and that there are a great many jurisdictions that have consequently flown largely under the radar. This is for many reasons, and has a range of implications, including for our collective understanding of the constitutional systems of the world, and therefore for the development of comparative constitutional theory.

One set of jurisdictions that has largely been overlooked in the literature is those that are small. Small can mean many things: a small population size, a small territory, small in the sense of being less powerful than neighbouring jurisdictions, or small economically speaking. Jurisdiction can also mean many things: a state, a sub-state unit within a federation, another kind of sub-state unit (Greenland is one such sub-state unit which is currently the focus of a great deal of global attention), or a legal order within a pluralist legal system.

In a newly-published edited collection called Small State Constitutionalism (Hart, 2025), we focus on only a subset of these possibilities: small jurisdictions with fewer than 1.5 million people living within the relevant territory, and that are widely recognised as states in the sense of complying with the Montevideo Convention criteria. But even this subset is significant – amounting to nearly a quarter of all states (over 40 out of a total of 193 UN member states) – and yet largely overlooked in the literature on constitution-making and constitutional design.

There has been excellent work focusing on the constitutional systems of particular small states or jurisdictions, including those located in particular regions (see, for example, here). We also acknowledge that the question of state size has received much greater attention in the fields of political science (particularly in relation to the relationship between state size and democracy), international relations (for example, in terms of the use of international law by small states), and economics (see here), as well as some attention in comparative law (see, for examples, these collections).

But as a whole, comparative constitutional scholars have given little systemic attention to these jurisdictions, and the questions of scale they raise. This is surprising, especially considering the reasonable intuition that scale will likely have an impact on the functioning of a system of constitutional self-government. This intuition has a long pedigree. In Western thought, for example, and as Dahl and Tufte have outlined, the ancient Greeks thought a good polity would be small in both territory and in population, but not so small that it could not be self-sufficient. Fast forward to the beginning of what we understand as modern constitutionalism, and Madison arguing in The Federalist 51 that – contra Rousseau and Montesquieu’s claims in favour of city states – there was a danger in a republic having too small and homogenous a community, because governments in such communities could easily overcome the formal separation of powers.

It was this relative lack of attention paid to small jurisdictions in comparative constitutional studies scholarship – despite the large number of such jurisdictions and this intuition – that led us to invite a range of scholars and practitioners to come together at a workshop in December 2023 to discuss the question of how jurisdiction size has impacted on constitutional self-government in the jurisdiction/s they are focused on. Those who joined included both early career scholars/practitioners and senior scholars, including those with experience living, teaching and practicing in small jurisdictions. The result of the work and discussions at that workshop – and following the workshop – is the new collection we note above: Small State Constitutionalism (Hart, 2025).

The volume in no way claims to cover the universe of small jurisdictions, or even small states. Rather, it contains 19 chapters focusing on a geographically diverse range of jurisdictions, but otherwise with some deliberate degree of randomness in selection. Some authors chose to focus on a single jurisdiction, while others devote attention to a number of jurisdictions to draw out a particular theme or experience. Overall, the volume also seeks to problematise the line between statehood and non-statehood, and to this end, it also includes chapters that focus on small non-state jurisdictions (including Tahiti, French Polynesia, Niue, the British Overseas Territories in the Caribbean, and the Caribbean countries within the Kingdom of the Netherlands).

We have conceived of the volume as the beginning, not the end, of a broader conversation about questions of whether and how scale (here understood as small population size) should, or does, impact on issues of constitutional design and operation, including questions of sovereignty, identity, culture, and transnational legal norms and relationships. We do not see this effort as being in competition with our colleagues in political science, international relations or economics – but rather as complementary, and as enabling us to bring to the conversation our unique disciplinary insights as (academic) lawyers.  Moreover, we see it as the beginning of an overlapping or “concentric” approach to constitutional scholarship on the issue of scale: our hope is that in publishing the collection, we will spur interest in the constitutional systems of a range of small states – and other small jurisdictions of varying scales and proportions.

Over the next few weeks, we are excited that many of the authors who contributed to that volume have agreed to prepare blog posts to contribute to this symposium, which either distil the arguments of their chapter in the book, focus and expand on one of those arguments, or advance an adjacent argument. Through sharing these posts with you, we hope both to highlight some of the great work in the collection, as well as some of the constitutional issues either caused by, or often encountered in conjunction with, the small size of a jurisdiction.  But we know that these posts will also be only the beginning of a much larger and longer conversation among readers of the blog.

This symposium has been guest edited by Dr Elisabeth Perham.

Elisabeth Perham is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney.

Maartje De Visser is Professor of Law at the Yong Pung How School of Law and College of Integrative Studies, Singapore Management University.

Rosalind Dixon is Scientia Professor and Anthony Mason Professor of Law at the Faculty of Law & Justice, UNSW Sydney.

Suggested Citation: Elisabeth Perham, Maartje De Visser and Rosalind Dixon, ‘Small State Constitutionalism: Introduction to the Symposium’ IACL-AIDC Blog (3 February 2026) Small State Constitutionalism: Introduction to the Symposium — IACL-IADC Blog