Greetings from Wake Forest,

As your instructor for the Comparative Constitutionalism class during the Ben Franklin Institute program this summer, which each of you will be taking for a portion of the program, I wanted to introduce myself and to ask each of you to take a little bit of time to familiarize yourself with 1) the U.S. constitution, as well as 2) the constitution of your country (for students from abroad) or your state (for students from the U.S.). In particular, I would like you to do several things prior to the class (and if any of you lack ready computer access at this moment, that’s not a problem, because there will be some time for computer research once you arrive at Wake Forest).

As a preliminary matter, you should familiarize yourself with the U.S. Constitution: see www.constitutioncenter.org/explore/TheU.S.Constitution/index.shtml

As another preliminary matter, you should also familiarize yourself with the constitution of your country or state. To find the text of nearly all national constitutions around the world (for students from abroad), see the following web-site: http://confinder.richmond.edu/

For the text of U.S. state constitutions (for students from the U.S.), try either of the following sites: http://www.findlaw.com/11stategov/indexconst.html or http://www.constitution.org/cons/usstcons.htm

Once you’ve taken a look at the U.S. Constitution and the constitution of your country or state, I’d like you to begin thinking about the following questions (you might also want to talk to several other persons in your country or state to get their ideas on some of these matters). There is no need to write or prepare anything formal in preparation for the class; I just want you to start thinking about these questions.

1) Familiarize yourself with the rights that are guaranteed by your country’s or state’s constitution, and compare these rights with the rights found in the U.S. Constitution.

2) Familiarize yourself with the structure of government outlined in your constitution (how is the executive selected, what powers does the executive have, and what restrictions are placed on executive power? how are judges selected and what powers do they have? what opportunities are there for direct popular participation in governance?), and then compare this structure with the structure of the U.S. government as outlined in the U.S. Constitution.

3) When was the current constitution of your country or state adopted, and did any other country’s or state’s constitution serve as a model for the drafting of your current constitution?

4) What do you view as the biggest problems with or deficiencies in the constitution of your country or state, and what solutions for these problems would you propose?

We will plan to talk in much more detail about these and other questions in our class on Comparative Constitutionalism. If you have an opportunity to give some thought to these matters ahead of time, then we can hit the ground running for our class. I look forward to meeting everyone.

Sincerely,
John Dinan
Instructor, Ben Franklin Institute Program