New constitutions are written every year. The people who write these important documents need to read and analyze texts from other places, gaining inspiration and direction when crafting those all-important national foundations. It’s a delicate, often painstakingly difficult process, but one website is trying to make it all a little bit simpler. An idea of the Comparative Constitutions Project, it was seeded with a grant from Google Ideas to the University of Texas at Austin, with additional financial support from the Indigo Trust and IC2, Constitute offers access to the world’s constitutions that users can systematically compare them across a broad set of topics, including elections, culture and identity, international law and rights and duties.
Currently Constitute has every constitution that was in force in September of 2013 for every independent state in the world. According to the project website, they will soon include data and text for a version of every available constitution ever written since 1789.
It definitely makes for interesting reading, and is well worth having a look around. You can visit Constitute here.
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