Law Commons^™

Japan's Constitution Across Time And Space, Carol Gluck

Center for Japanese Legal Studies

Constitutional reform is a matter of time, the time when the original and the revisions were drafted; and of space, the global context which comprises the transnational constitutional expanse that influenced all modern constitutions from the late eighteenth century on. Of the some 198 written constitutions now in force, more than half were promulgated during the past sixty years. The U.S. Constitution of 1787 is the oldest, and if one counts the 1947 Constitution as an amendment of the Meiji Constitution of 1889 – which formally and technically it was – Japan’s is the world’s tenth oldest written constitution still …