Stand up for the facts!
Our only agenda is to publish the truth so you can be an informed participant in democracy.
We need your help.
I would like to contribute
Goodlatte says U.S. has the oldest working national constitution
U.S. Rep. Bob Goodlatte was among many Virginia lawmakers who wished the U.S. Constitution a happy 227th birthday on Sep. 17.
"As we reflect with reverence on the oldest written constitution still in use today, let’s also not forget the dangers of an unchecked executive branch," Goodlatte, R-6th, said in a video.
We’ll pass on the jab at President Barack Obama for executive overreach. Our goal is to check whether the U.S. really has the oldest active constitution.
Beth Breeding, Goodlatte’s spokeswoman, pointed to several documents supporting the congressman’s statement. Among them is a passage from the U.S. Senate website, which says the Constitution is "The world’s longest surviving written charter of government." Breeding noted that similar statements appear on the websites of the National Archives, Encyclopedia Britannica, and The Constitution Center in Philadelphia -- a museum dedicated to the U.S. Constitution.
We ran Goodlatte’s statement by Tom Ginsburg , a University of Chicago professor and a principal investigator with the Comparative Constitutions Project, which has examined national constitutions around the world. He agreed with the congressman and directed us to a list his group has compiled on when national constitutions were enacted. The oldest one is the United States’. Although signed in 1787, it needed to be ratified by the states and didn’t go into effect until 1789.
Next on the seniority list is Norway, which enacted its constitution in 1814, and then Belgium, in 1831.
Although we may think of constitutions as yellowing pieces of parchment, that’s not always the case. Only half live more than 19 years, according to a summary of a 2009 book that Ginsburg co-wrote about constitutions around the world.
While many constitutional experts agree with Goodlatte, his statement does not get unanimous ratification. As our colleagues at PolitiFact noted in 2011, there’s a debate among scholars over whether some countries have an older constitution than the U.S.
It all depends on how you define a constitution.
Merriam Webster’s dictionary defines the term a couple of ways. One of them is as a governing document. But another way is as a "system of beliefs and laws by which a country, state or organization is governed."
Some countries don’t have a formal central constitution like the U.S., but rather pull from a collection of laws, practices and texts that date back centuries.