Canada has displaced the US as the constitutional superpower. This is the position earned by the country with the constitution that inspires most of the new constitution developments and revisions. A couple of generations ago the US was the model, but no more. For example, the Second Amendment giving citizens the right to “bear arms” is only featured in two other national documents.
Some interesting historical and contemporary insights:
In a television interview during a visit to Egypt last week, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court seemed to agree. “I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012,” she said. She recommended, instead, the South African Constitution, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the European Convention on Human Rights.
The rights guaranteed by the American Constitution are parsimonious by international standards, and they are frozen in amber. As Sanford Levinson wrote in 2006 in “Our Undemocratic Constitution,” “the U.S. Constitution is the most difficult to amend of any constitution currently existing in the world today.” (Yugoslavia used to hold that title, but Yugoslavia did not work out.)
Other nations routinely trade in their constitutions wholesale, replacing them on average every 19 years. By odd coincidence, Thomas Jefferson, in a 1789 letter to James Madison, once said that every constitution “naturally expires at the end of 19 years” because “the earth belongs always to the living generation.” These days, the overlap between the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and those most popular around the world is spotty.
‘We the People’ Loses Appeal With People Around the World - NYTimes.com
So this story is not a call for better defending one of the most irrelevant constitutions around. It is a call for quite the opposite.
