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The purpose of this paper is to detail a simulation exploring the academic and real-world debates surrounding constitutional design.

The authors deployed this simulation in different contexts: undergraduate courses in comparative politics and middle school classrooms of gifted students in India.

In conjunction with discussion of institutional setup, such as parliamentary vs presidential systems and judicial review vs parliamentary sovereignty, the students were required to design a new constitution for a fictional country that just overthrew a brutal dictator. Throughout the simulation, the students were assigned to be the representatives of a particular ethnic group, each with distinct interests to be represented during the constitutional convention.

The authors detail the learning objectives and simulation setup for this constitutional convention. Finally, the authors discuss some issues raised by the students during the simulation.

This chapter explores the political economy of banking in Texas at the turn of the last century. The empirical work sheds light on why Texans voted to allow the chartering of banks by the state government. The evidence shows that county-level voting patterns for state-chartered banks were significantly related to business interests, consumer interests, agricultural activity, and the presence of existing national banks. The work also shows that the first counties to receive the new state banks were associated with higher agricultural activity, larger population size, and the presence of existing national banks. By examining the vote and the location of early entrants in state banking, this chapter contributes to the literature exploring the historical development of state-chartered banking and the dual-banking system in the US.

This chapter provides a brief overview of community sanctions in Australia and examines the extent to which McNeill’s analysis in Pervasive Punishment (2019) is applicable in the Australian context. Two key issues in the Australian context are, firstly, state and territory-level variations within a federal political structure, and secondly, disproportionate Indigenous imprisonment and community sanction rates and the generally destructive impact of the criminal legal system on Indigenous communities and peoples. The chapter argues that developing a better agonistic politics around community sanctions requires descending from the broad level of historical and sociological analysis to examine state and territory-level variations in judicial and correctional structures, histories and cultures. Further, that Australian community sanctions cannot be understood without a primary focus on the differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous rates, experiences and meaning. The key to addressing the destructive impact of criminal legal processes and practices on Indigenous peoples lies in developing Indigenous governance, empowerment, self-determination, sovereignty and nation-building. Two recent developments promoting Indigenous governance are examined: the Uluru Statement from the Heart and Justice Reinvestment projects initiated by First Nations communities, highlighting the importance of activism, contest and struggle by community organisations.

College instructors are entering a new frontier of teaching in the 21st century. Millennial students are bringing to university classrooms different experiences regarding the ways they learn and engage in critical thinking. As online universities gain more popularity across the country, higher education institutions are offering more hybrid and distance-learning courses on the Internet match the demand for using technology for teaching and learning. This action research study evaluates how the Annenberg Media digital simulation The Constitutional Convention of 1787 effected student engagement in an undergraduate history course at a community college in a metropolitan region of the Southeast. Practical suggestions are provided for college level history instructors to adapt digital simulations for teaching curricular and content skills that foster critical thinking, digital literacy, and engaged learning.

One of the most dramatic controversies over judicial independence in the United States occurred at the state level, in antebellum Kentucky, when two entirely different state high courts remained in operation, each claiming to be the only legitimate tribunal. This chapter describes Kentucky's two-court crisis, but focuses primarily on the constitutional convention of 1849, which followed it. Through the lens of modern scholarship about judicial independence, the lessons that antebellum Kentuckians drew from their own history seem quite counterintuitive. They did not view their project of judicial design as a matter of balancing judicial independence with accountability, a task that many modern scholars of American politics have posited as the central problem of judicial design. Instead, Kentucky's constitutional convention sought to structure an institution that would allow the state's courts to respond to popular sentiment without compromising their independence. Thus, these debates suggest frameworks for understanding judicial independence that do not pit independence against judicial accountability or popular politics, but attempt to discern which forms of politics threaten the independence of courts, and which forms may not.