jasencomstock:

Some stupid conservatives on twitter were crying last week that Justice Ginsberg was advising jurists from Egypt to, like, not copy the Constitution.  This came as a surprise to absolutely no one except for conservatives with eagle and flag tattoos, and Dave Weigel shot them down with, “yeah and we didn’t advise Iraq or Afghanistan to copy us either.”

Anyway, the NYT’s, published some statistics about other countries that are fun.

The study, to be published in June in The New York University Law Review, bristles with data. Its authors coded and analyzed the provisions of 729 constitutions adopted by 188 countries from 1946 to 2006, and they considered 237 variables regarding various rights and ways to enforce them.

Talk about turnover!

These days, the overlap between the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and those most popular around the world is spotty. We recognize rights not widely protected, including ones to a speedy and public trial, and we are an outlier in prohibiting government establishment of religion. But the Constitution is out of step with the rest of the world in failing to protect, at least in so many words, a right to travel, the presumption of innocence and entitlement to food, education and health care.

We have our idiosyncrasies. Only 2 percent of the world’s constitutions protect, as our Second Amendment does, a right to bear arms. (Our brothers in arms are Guatemala and Mexico.)

oh yeah, also:

There are, of course, limits to empirical research based on coding and counting, and there is more to a constitution than its words, as Justice Antonin Scalia told the Senate Judiciary Committee in October. “Every banana republic in the world has a bill of rights,” he said.

“The bill of rights of the former evil empire, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, was much better than ours,” he said, adding: “We guarantee freedom of speech and of the press. Big deal. They guaranteed freedom of speech, of the press, of street demonstrations and protests, and anyone who is caught trying to suppress criticism of the government will be called to account. Whoa, that is wonderful stuff!”

“Of course,” Justice Scalia continued, “it’s just words on paper, what our framers would have called a ‘parchment guarantee.’ ”