Does your state lean blue or lean red? Check out our new report, highlighting partisan control of state government from 1992-2013.
State constitution
From Ballotpedia
A state constitution is the governing document of a U.S. state, comparable to the United States Constitution which is the governing document of the United States. Some states have had multiple constitutions and since each state drafts its own, there is great diversity between them, though all have some basic concepts in common.
Front cover of the Arizona Constitution adopted in 1891
The average length of a state constitution is 26,000 words (compared to about 8,700 words for the U.S. constitution). (Dye, 2007) The longest state governing document is that of Alabama, which has over 172,000 words. That document is also the most amended state constitution in the Union, with over 770 amendments. The average state constitution has been amended about 115 times. The oldest state constitution still in effect is that of Massachusetts, which took effect in 1780. The newest is the Georgia Constitution, which was ratified in 1983.
List of state constitutions
External links
- The Green Papers: Constitutions of the Several states
- The Green Papers: State constitutions, an explanation
- The Green Papers: Links to state constitutions
- Citings of Religious Influence in First State Constitutions
References
- Hammons, Christopher W. (1999). Was James Madison wrong? Rethinking the American preference for short, framework-oriented constitutions. American Political Science Review. Dec. 1999.
- The appendices to this article contain substantial data on state constitutions.
| |||||||||||||
