This research was conducted over a period of 10 years during which time I lived in five different countries and learnt three languages. The project started germinating when I was still an undergraduate student and first encountered comparative constitutional law at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg. It subsequently became the subject of my Diplôme d’Études Approfondies (DEA, equivalent to a LLM) dissertation and of the PhD proposal that I submitted to the European University Institute (EUI), where I undertook most of the research on which this work is based
