BOOK PROJECT
Changing Roles
Changing Roles: judicial authority and regime transformation in Turkey. Under review at Cambridge University Press.
University of Copenhagen · Faculty of Law
Erdem Demirtaş
Erdem Demirtaş is a political scientist and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Law. He studies courts, constitutions and democratic backsliding, combining judicial politics and constitutional law with natural language processing — currently measuring conceptual change in six decades of Turkish constitutional jurisprudence in the TRACE project.
CURRENT PROJECT · MSCA 2025–2027
TRACE — Tracing Informal Constitutional Change
Constitutions can transform while their text stands still. TRACE builds contextual word-embedding models over sixty years of Turkish Constitutional Court jurisprudence to detect and measure that hidden movement — how concepts like rights, secularism and the state itself quietly change meaning.
DATA & RESOURCES
Courts and parliaments, as text
Turkish Constitutional Court database (1962–2025) and a Turkish parliamentary speech corpus — open for computational research.
NEWS
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Jul 2026
"Proportionality Without Uniformity" accepted — forthcoming in the Human Rights Law Review.
Sep–Oct 2026
Upcoming: SISP 2026 (Trento) and the IPSA RC09 workshop on court roles in the authoritarian moment (UNAM, Mexico City).
Jun 2026
Presented "Measuring Semantic Change in Constitutional Reasoning" at the ESELS Annual Conference, Ljubljana.
May–Jun 2026
Selected for the inaugural Summer Academy on LLMs for Social Science at Columbia University; presented a dual-embedding framework at Yale's AI for Social Science workshop.
2026
R&R at the Journal of Law and Courts — "The Turkish Constitutional Court Database".