The earliest constitutions appeared in Venezuela, Chile, and New Granada in the years 1811 12.
This function was first recorded in 196, the date of the earliest constitutions contained in the Gregorian Codex, but the city is thought to have served as a repository since earlier times.
The ingenious argument is that really this would be only a second term, since his first victory, in 1990, came under an earlier constitution.
And he probably will be able to stand if he chooses: the constitution bars a third term, but a later, controversial law interpreting it allows him, since his first term was under an earlier constitution, to say that, under the new one, he is only in his first term anyway.
For example, a by-law is legally valid because it is created by a corporation lawfully exercising the powers conferred on it by the legislature, which confers those powers in a manner provided by the constitution, which was itself created in a way provided by an earlier constitution.
He said that while the Washington Constitution mirrored the prohibitions found in many of the early state constitutions against using tax money to support ministers, it was nonetheless quite protective of religion in many respects.
Franklin Roosevelt, who helped draft an early Haitian constitution, is considered a different kind of white king.
The U.S. Supreme Court was established in 1789, but drew on the experience of earlier state constitutions.
The Gregorian reform movement therefore aggravated the age-old contradictions in Germany's early medieval constitution, but its monastic culture and its intellectual interests were anything but barren.
But if Mr Yar'Adua had to leave early, the constitution says that the vice-president, Goodluck Jonathan, would take the helm until elections at the end of the four-year cycle.
