When Good Constitutions Go Bad
- “Non,” “Nee” and now the UK isn’t even going to ask. The European Constitution itself is a massive document of more than 250 pages and 448 – or is it 465? – articles, drafted via a year-long, open access process. But somewhere the process – and the PR – failed. The U.S. constitution has only seven articles, and its writers knew it had to be simple and readable if it was going to pass. We want to know what’s in a constitution: whether the key is in the writing or the ratifying or the PR or all of it. Was the American experience an anomaly – or an example?
- John J. O’Brien Professor of Comparative Law and Sociology, University of Pennslyvania Law School
worked on the Afghani and Hungarian constitutions, has been invited to help write one for Iraq
[over ISDN from Philadelphia]
- professor of constitutional law at Yale, just completed a biography of the US constitution
[by phone from New Haven, CT]
- blogger; UK Member of the European Parliament; and Chair of the Constitutional Affairs committee
[by phone from Strasbourg, France]