Researched, compiled and written by faculty and staff of NEU’s School of Natural Law.
Creating a Constitution
Depending on the size of your group will define the process you engage in creating your constitution. Never forgetting that it is the people of the nation themselves who the constitution belongs to and thus it is they who ought to write it.
If you are a family, the drafting your constitution will be simple – you will all sit around a table and decide what is important to you and how you will govern yourselves. Your constitution might even be as simple as “Follow no leaders, have no followers, do no harm, love thy neighbor, govern thyself with integrity and honor.” Or you might elect to provision for a form of government to administer certain services – the choice is yours.
If you are a community group and your group is not too large, you too may all sit around a table and engage in a group co-creative exercise. Or if your community group is a little too large for this to work effectively you might collectively appoint several of your number whom you respect and trust, to represent the group and prepare the Constitution on your collective behalf.
If you are an existing nation-state who is intending to redraft your constitution (like Iceland did) or a larger province, which is seeking to secede from an existing nation-state, a representative group is likely to be your only real choice…
So what constitutes a ‘representative group’ and still allows for the will of the people to prevail for the sovereignty of the individual and the collective group to exist simultaneously?
Iceland’s Crowd-sourced Constitution is an excellent example of how to engage ALL of the people in the Constitution process. Although their efforts ultimately failed, the reasons why they failed are not relevant to most groups (large community groups, provinces seceding from a nation-state) who are engaging now with NewEarth Project (its fractal, New Earth Nation), and so it stands as an excellent model for your nation/micro-nation if you represent such a group. Whatever exact process you and the people of your nation/micro-nation determine to enact, it is necessary, if the sovereignty of both the individual and aggregate group are to be adequately respected, that transparency, inclusivity, engagement of ALL people, and a justly appointed deliberative assembly made up of sovereign men and women which operates by consensus absent the influence of vested interests, are key attributes of the process.
Check out our article on Constitutional Design for inspiration on the framework, which your deliberative assembly may adopt to help improve the efficacy of your own Constitution.
You may also find the following resource (article) helpful: Five lessons from Iceland’s failed experiment in creating a crowd-sourced constitution
Copy/paste the URL to your browser: https://slate.com/technology/2014/07/five-lessons-from-icelands-failed-crowdsourced-constitution-experiment.html
