February 17, 2020
The Comparative Constitutions Project (CCP) launched Constitute in collaboration with Google Ideas in 2013. Accessible in English, Spanish, and Arabic, Constitute is an online environment to read, search, and compare the world’s constitutions. The site contains the full text, indexed with CCP data, for nearly every active national constitution in the world. All of the constitutions have been tagged by subject area, allowing users to discover relevant constitutional provisions on particular subjects, no matter how they are worded. In addition to browsing more than 300 topics tagged by CCP, users can execute their own searches, sort their results by region or time period, and pin content for further analysis. The CCP, in partnership with the American Bar Association Division for Public Education, provides Constitute lesson plans to help bring the world’s constitutions into classrooms, grades 5 and up, as a way to empower students as citizens. The first four lessons engage students in exploring world constitutions, drafting a 28th Amendment to the US Constitution, digging deeper into a particular constitutional topic, and drafting a unique constitutional preamble. A fifth lesson plan uses Constitute as a research tool for the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum’s world history diploma paper on Evolution and Development of Democratic States.