
Ask HN: Any academic efforts of writing new national democratic constitutions? - pareshverma91
Some (most?) of the national democratic constitutions were written right after or during the periods of distress, and under some urgency, perhaps skipping some cool headed debate&#x2F;discussions. Amendments to a constitution are supposed to correct issues with them and keep it up to date according to cultural shifts and scientific discoveries. But even then some aspects would be mediocre given the involved lobbying, trade-offs, vote-gathering etc. Are there any academic efforts of creating new democratic constitutions, which has gone through the rigor of peer reviews and validations against the known forms of inequalities, corruption, injustices, new techinical capabilities etc? Or is a constitution too context (read culture, mindset, economy) dependent or philosophical that such an effort won&#x27;t be fruitful?
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AnimalMuppet
It seems to me that all possible constitutions have weaknesses. You could give
a range of possible current best-practice ideas, each with strengths and
weaknesses, and the country will pick one. Almost inevitably, they will pick
the one whose strengths best address what was wrong with their previous
situation. (In military terms, they're fighting the last war, not the next
one.) Maybe that's the one that they most need, in the short term. It may not
be the one that they need in the long term, though.

And trying to make a constitution perfect can result in some monstrously long
documents. One of the virtues of the US Constitution is that it's short enough
for a grade-school kid to plow through and actually understand.

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pseudolus
This might not be directly on point but there have been several law review and
social science articles pointing to the Canadian constitution as being the
preferred template. Here's a link to the PDF of an article that appeared in
the NYU Law Review.

[https://www.nyulawreview.org/wp-
content/uploads/2018/08/NYUL...](https://www.nyulawreview.org/wp-
content/uploads/2018/08/NYULawReview-87-3-Law-Versteeg_0.pdf)

