The Failure of Constitutional Torture Prohibitions
研究了宪法中禁止酷刑的条款是否实际减少了酷刑行为，利用新数据和改进方法发现没有显著效果，对关注人权与法律实效的学者有参考价值。
The prohibition of torture is one of the most emblematic norms of the modern human rights movement, and its prevalence in national constitutions has increased steeply in the past 3 decades. Yet little is known about whether constitutional torture prohibitions actually reduce torture. In this article, we explore the relationship between constitutional torture prohibitions and torture practices by utilizing new data that correct for biases in previous measures of torture and a recently developed method that mitigates selection bias by incorporating information about countries’ constitutional commitments into our research design. Using these new data and this new method, as well as more conventional data sources and methods, we find no evidence that constitutional torture prohibitions have reduced rates of torture in a statistically significant or substantively meaningful way.