Constitute recognized as an “outstanding source” for comparing constitutions

Professor Tom Ginsburg’s collaborative research tool, Constitute: “The World’s Constitutions to Read, Search, and Compare,” has been named one of the Best Free Reference Websites of 2015! Winning sites are selected by the American Library Association Reference and User Services Association Emerging Technologies Section. Criteria for selection include quality, depth, usefulness, currency, and uniqueness of content, authoritativeness, efficiency, ease of access and use.

The Machine-Assisted Reference Services (MARS) Best Free Reference Websites Committee, in its annotations to the list of 2015 winners, describes Constitute as follows:

[T]his site provides constitutions in force as of September 2013 from most of the world’s independent states. Constitutions are updated as they are amended. A user can browse using an alphabetical list, read in html, download in pdf, search by keyword or phrase, see where specific topics occur in each constitution, and select two to eight constitutions to compare side-by-side on a particular topic. The site has a clean, uncluttered design, with date of the constitution in effect and date of last amendment shown next to each country’s name. It is appropriate for students, scholars, and anyone interested in this topic. Constitute is an outstanding source for learning about and comparing the constitutions of most countries of the world.

Note that Constitute is a result of partnerships of the Comparative Constitutions Project with Google, Google Ideas, International IDEA, and many others. Constitute has not only an English interface (194 countries), but also an Arabic interface (54 independent states). Find out more about the project here.