Foreign Law Guide

FOREIGN LAW GUIDE

Constitutions in Force

A constitution is the easiest foreign text to find and the hardest to pin to a date.

Dozens of sites will hand you a document called the constitution of some country. Far fewer will tell you which amendments are folded into the copy you are reading, when the last of them took effect, or whether the file was assembled by the state that enacted it or by somebody gathering texts at a distance. Those three questions decide whether the document on your screen is evidence or furniture.

So the useful division is not between good sites and bad ones. It is between a collection and a publisher, and this guide is built on the publisher side of that line.

A collection gathers texts from everywhere and normalises them, usually into English, usually into a common structure, so that one country's article on the reservation of legislative power can be read beside the nearest thing to it somewhere else. That work is genuinely hard and the good collections do it well.

COLLECTIONS THAT GATHER TEXTS

  • Constitute (opens an external site) States that all of the world's currently in force constitutions are here, indexed by topic so provisions can be read side by side. Interface links for English, Arabic and Spanish. The texts themselves are assembled in the browser, so an automated client gets the description and not the collection.
  • Comparative Constitutions Project (opens an external site) The academic project behind Constitute, which it puts at more than 200 constitutional texts searchable by topic or provision. It also offers constitutional data for download as a separate thing from the texts, which is the half a reader wanting numbers rather than prose needs.
  • ConstitutionNet (opens an external site) Run by International IDEA, which the page says established and manages it, from the Stockholm address in its own footer. Its Resources menu holds publications, tools and databases, primers and documents, and it describes itself as the online knowledge-sharing hub for the constitution-building community.
  • World Constitutions Illustrated, HeinOnline (opens an external site) Paywalled. Claims the current constitution of every country in the world plus a constitutional history for each, and counts its own holdings at 8,210 titles and 13,735 volumes. No figure on the page carries a currency symbol: it asks for a quote and describes its packages as priced by institution, so reaching it means a library that already subscribes.

What none of those can do is tell you, on its own authority, that the version it holds was the version in force on the day your facts happened. A collection holds a copy. Somebody else holds the original, and the gap between the two is measured in amendments nobody has caught up with yet. The collections do not hide this. The paywalled one above says on its own page that it is updated monthly with new constitutions and amendments; the project behind Constitute posts its additions in batches, six new constitutions and thirty-one amended texts in the most recent announcement on its home page. An update cadence is a way of admitting there is an interval, and the interval is where a superseded text lives.

A publisher, by contrast, is the state itself, or the court or ministry the state has put in charge of saying what the text is. Its copy is usually in one language only, is usually harder to navigate, and is usually the one a court will recognise. Each entry below was fetched, and its behaviour toward an automated client is part of what the annotation records, because that is the difference between a text you can build a tool against and one you have to open by hand. This list stays short on purpose: an address goes here once a specific constitutional text has actually been retrieved from it, never by extending a pattern to a jurisdiction nobody checked.

PUBLISHERS THAT ISSUE THEM

Two habits follow. The first is to distrust an undated file: a constitution with no revision label attached is not obviously wrong, but it is unverifiable, and an unverifiable text is worth very little in a footnote. The second is that a translation is a reading of the law rather than the law, however careful the translator was and whoever paid for the work.

One more thing worth saying plainly, because it is unusual in foreign legal research. HeinOnline sells a large historical constitutional library and it is a serious piece of work, and its own page says what the subscription is for: a constitutional history for each country, made of the original text, the amending laws, the consolidated text and the important related texts, alongside constitutional periodicals and thousands of classic books. Constitute's page states something else, that it holds every constitution currently in force, indexed by topic. Knowing which of those two a project is actually after is the decision worth making first, because the HeinOnline page publishes no price at all and asks instead for a quote.

Where this guide has already done that work for a jurisdiction, the constitution in force is stated on that country's own page, with the publisher it was read from and whatever that publisher says about how current its own copy is, which on some of them is a labelled amendment and on others is nothing at all. Those pages are reached from the alphabetical country index, or from the grouped one linked above if the tradition matters to the question.

SOURCES

  1. Constitute, home page of the constitutional text collection. Comparative Constitutions Project. https://www.constituteproject.org. Accessed 2026-08-31.
  2. Comparative Constitutions Project, home page. Comparative Constitutions Project. https://comparativeconstitutionsproject.org/. Accessed 2026-08-31.
  3. ConstitutionNet, home page. International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. https://constitutionnet.org/. Accessed 2026-08-31.
  4. World Constitutions Illustrated, the publisher's description of the database. William S. Hein & Co., Inc.. https://heinonline.com/content/world-constitutions-illustrated/. Accessed 2026-08-31.
  5. Costituzione della Repubblica Italiana, consolidated text. Normattiva, Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri. https://www.normattiva.it/uri-res/N2Ls?urn:nir:stato:costituzione:1947-12-27. Accessed 2026-08-29.
  6. Texte intégral de la Constitution du 4 octobre 1958 en vigueur. Conseil constitutionnel. https://www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr/le-bloc-de-constitutionnalite/texte-integral-de-la-constitution-du-4-octobre-1958-en-vigueur. Accessed 2026-08-29.

Reviewed 2026-08-31. 6 sources cited on this page.