American Civil Law Origins: Implications for
Ten American states were settled by France, Mexico or Spain and had civil law legal
systems in place at the time of the American Revolution. We argue that this initial
condition had persistent effects on state constitutions, because under civil law legal
traditions, laws were spelled out in a legal code that judges administer. When these states
entered the Union and adopted common law, their civil law tradition led them to adopt
state constitutions that were longer and more detailed than common law state
constitutions. This greater length and specificity of these constitutions created demand for
constitutional change as preferences and circumstances changed. Constitutional
instability is likely to have a negative impact on state court quality because it has the
potential to both weaken judicial review and to destabilize the legal framework. Using
four separate measures of constitutional instability and controlling for a set of covariates,
we quantify the substantial negative impact of constitutional instability on state courts.
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