Word: documentation
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...outlaws abortion and divorce and proclaims the Holy Trinity the source of all political power. Japan's national charter renounces war. Portugal's forbids private ownership of television stations. Peru reprints its charter in the Lima telephone directory, filling ten pages of fine print. Yet beneath such diversity, each document can trace its rights and freedoms to U.S. soil. Says Joseph Magnet, a law professor at Canada's University of Ottawa: "America has been and remains the great constitutional laboratory for the entire world...
...weeks ago, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall objected to some of the pietism attending the 200th anniversary of the Constitution. Speaking to a lawyers' group in Hawaii, Marshall said the document had been "defective from the start." The fact that Marshall is the great-grandson of a slave sharpened his point...
...believe," Marshall went on, "that the meaning of the Constitution was forever 'fixed' at the Philadelphia convention." The document required "several amendments, a civil war and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today...
...flawed from the beginning as the nation was flawed. But the Constitution has also been the genius of America, the life of its laws and the conscience of its power. The Constitution and the country formed each other. The genius lay in the hermeneutical life of the document, the complicated, brilliant, sometimes disgraceful unfolding of America...
...invented a true U.S. Ever since, the country has gone on inventing and reinventing itself -- the Constitution shaping the nation, a changing America rethinking the Constitution. The one time the Constitution proved inadequate to the task, in the 1860s, half a million died in order to improve the document. The Civil War amounted to a Second Constitutional Convention...