Rudman Summer Fellow of the Week: Bryan Rome
Bryan Rome is working this summer with the Hon. J. William Delker, Judge at Hillsborough Superior Court North in Manchester, on a research project, focusing on the New Hampshire Constitution. He is a rising 2L.
Bryan Rome describes his work collecting and organizing information about the N.H. Constitution, with the goal of helping to facilitate public access to the materials.
On the similarities -- and differences -- between the U.S. Constitution and the N.H. Constitution.
If you look at our State’s Constitution, there are many common threads with our Federal Constitution, but we have structured it differently. Our Bill of Rights is in the first part, and then the structure of government is the second.
The questions presented to the voters regarding amending the New Hampshire Constitution,
We amend our State Constitution differently than we do the Federal Constitution. First, the amendments to the State’s Constitution are integrated into old articles revising or repealing them rather than adding them at the end. Secondly, we amend our State Constitution more than we do our Federal one; the N.H. Constitution has over 200 amendments; compare that to the U.S. Constitution, which has only been amended 27 times.
I found a quote from an address given when they were trying to get the current Constitution ratified, and it says: “A perfect system of government is not to be expected in the present imperfect state of humanity. But could a faultless one be framed, it would not be universally approved unless its judges were all equally perfect.” They were trying to build a system that would last. But, at the same time, they understood that it couldn’t be so rigid that future generations could not change it. And the people of the state of New Hampshire have changed it many times. Through the legislative-proposal method and through constitutional conventions. And we have had seventeen Constitutional Conventions, so this is something we do a lot more at the state level than we do at the Federal level, where we have only had one Constitutional Convention.
On the research experience:
I’ve been going through old books from as far back as the 1770s. Some of them are bound in dried-out leather and have been untouched on shelves for so long that when you pick them up and hold them, sometimes dried-up leather particles from their bindings will actually fall off them.
The only known surviving audio recording of New Hampshire's 1956 Constitutional Convention, discovered uncatalogued in the State Supreme Court Library.
It’s actually really interesting seeing the old texts, knowing that these have been here for over two centuries, and that these still have value in what we’re doing today, because it was such an effective system and it allowed itself to be changed for the future.
The work is kind of an unending project. You can’t fully know the scale of it because you’ll find things you didn’t know anyone had before. The other day, I found a reel-to-reel audio tape from the 1956 Constitutional Convention. The State Supreme Court library’s librarian didn’t even know she had it. So we’re going to try and see if we can get that digitized. It’s an endless process, so I hope in the future it continues on, because here in New Hampshire, we actually rely on our constitution a lot more than other states. Here, the courts won’t even look at a Federal Constitutional issue if they haven’t addressed a State one first, because our State Constitution offers so many more protections.
On making it easier for others to research the N.H. Constitution:
What we’re hoping to do by the end of summer is to create a way to allow future students to get onboarded, so they can continue to research our State’s Constitution without starting at square one. I’m trying to have an online version of the State Constitution, where you can click a dropdown menu and see how each option was previously written. And, I’m also working to collect a bunch of sources for future researchers to look at and to create a short summary of our State’s Constitutional history. Ultimately, I want to make this work something that continues past my time at UNH, so future students can use their time to do some of the heavy lifting most practitioners don’t have the time to do in practice.
