# Constitutions

Constitutions as Data – Conclusion and Future Research

The world’s constitutions amount to more than 4.6 million words – impossible to investigate thoroughly if you’re only reading it. Data science renders legal analysis scalable and provides lawyers with new tools to tackle big legal data. This series of posts has shown how a few lines of code can investigate the global constitutional landscape […]

Constitutions as Data (IV) : Identical Constitutions Are a Legacy of British Colonialism in the Caribbean

A constitution’s primary role is to describe the rules a government must obey when governing a country. The documents set clear “rules of the game” and protect a population from their government’s abuses of power. Yet, in every country, the optimal rules and protections will be different. As a result, protections that may allow one […]

Constitutions as Data (III): Using Regular Expressions to Explore Gender Protections

Over the past 125 years, states have consistently updated their laws to protect against discrimination. This means that historically legal systems were ripe with inequities that would not be tolerated by today’s standards. The list of potential grievances is lengthy, but discrimination on the basis of sex and gender would be high on any list. […]

Constitutions as Data (II): Identifying the Constitutionalization of Weapons Through Word Frequency Counts

The regulation of firearms is often controversial, but more than half of the constitutions in the world have some sort of language referring to firearms. In offering these protections, countries must balance property rights, protections against tyranny, public safety, and a handful of other considerations. To do so, there is often a need to coordinate […]

Constitutions as Data: Introduction to a Blog Series on Data-Driven Comparative Constitutional Law

Constitutions enshrine the basic rules governing societies. Comparing constitutions can therefore reveal much about the values and institutions that countries have in common and that distinguish them. But, with more than 200 constitutions existing around the world, it is challenging to get a truly global perspective of the constitutional landscape.  Fortunately, there is legal data […]

Constitutions as Data (I): Using Meta-Data to Track Constitution-Making

There are few moments in a country’s history that are more important than the adoption of a new constitution. If a constitution is implemented and upheld by the courts, then people are protected from their country’s most egregious abuses of power. The moment at which a constitution is adopted is important because these protections are […]