What one can learn from foreign-language translations of the U.S. Constitution

There is much that could be said about the fascinating discovery by Professor Mulligan and her colleagues of the Dutch and German translations of the English text of the US Constitution drafted in Philadelphia in 1787. But, of course, that draft consisted only of proposals; what was key was the transmission shortly afterward to the citizenry at large for what the first Federalist aptly described as their "reflection and choice" about the new system proposed to replace what its critics called the "imbecility" of the polity established by the Articles of Confederation. Here, Levinson discusses the three different perspectives from which one can mount one's own analysis of the non-English language texts.