we the people

With a picnic basket hung from one arm and Toto clutched in the other, Dorothy confided to Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, that she now knew to look no farther than her own backyard when seeking her heart’s desire. To learn that lesson, she had to be swept up in a Kansas tornado and carried over the rainbow to enter upon a fantastic adventure in the Land of Oz.

Sociology and law professor Kim Lane Scheppele understands how Dorothy’s education worked. Scheppele, a Senior Visiting Scholar at the National Constitution Center, teaches Comparative Constitutional Law and has studied the new constitutions of emerging democracies as well as the old legal codes that underlie the world’s democratic traditions. She says the best way to understand the American legal system is to study other systems, to see our own as an outsider would. "It’s sort of like you can never know your own home town ‘til you leave–because you never had anything to compare it to. So things that you take to be absolutely natural, and therefore things you don’t pay attention to, look really weird when you suddenly find it isn’t that way everywhere."

College dean Rick Beeman agrees with Dorothy too. An historian and American constitutional scholar, he proclaims, "I believe that the ideals on which the American nation is founded–embodied most eloquently in the Declaration of Independence in its promise of equality and in the Constitution in its promise of equal justice for all–are the most noble set of ideas ever articulated by a known society." There’s no place like home.

Still, he’s not an uncritical patriot, pointing out that our nation has many times failed grievously to live up to its egalitarian ideals. He’s quick to note that democracy is no guarantee of justice or stability. "Often the establishment of democratic government in place of an authoritarian one gives the ‘freedom’ for ancient ethnic, religious, and tribal hatreds to emerge, as in Eastern Europe today." Popular sovereignty, he says, demands respect for fundamental rights and the rule of law, but most of all it needs the understanding and sustained devotion of "we the people." There are, after all, two Wicked Witches–East and West.