Interpreting Constitutions

Joel I. Colon-Rios, Victoria University of Wellington, has published Law, Language, and the New Latin American Constitutions, in the New Zealand Journal of Public and International Law (2011) and the Victoria University of Wellington Law Review (2011). Here is the abstract.

Latin America has many languages and many constitutions. This article provides a general overview of the ways in which some constitutions of states of Latin America relate to the multi-lingual context in which they operate. After providing a brief account of Latin American constitutional history in Part I, the essay will thus consider the relationship between language and constitutions in three different contexts: the creation of new constitutions, constitutional protection of language rights, and the process of making a constitution accessible to speakers of a language different from the one in which it was originally written.

Download the full text from SSRN at the link.