<i>Successful models include the precise Mexican constitution of 1917, which has survived through periods of dictatorship and democracy, Ginsburg notes.</i><p>If a written constitution can actually endure "through periods of dictatorship and democracy", it may be notable in that the document itself survived and remained, nominally, in legal force for a very long time, but it's somewhat failed at providing a stable form of government, hasn't it? I'd rather have something like, say, France, where they've rewritten the constitution enough times to be on their Fifth Republic but at least they've had <i>a</i> republic of some form for over a hundred years (not counting foreign occupations and puppet states).<p>Also, judging by the explicit and implicit amendments and interpretations, the US is arguably on its third Constitution--the first being the Articles of Confederation, the second being the antebellum Constitution, and the third being the present Constitution.
Personally? I think its because the US Constitution wasn't written to solve every problem of the day. It was written as a framework, to let lawmakers solve problems as they came up. And the framework is malleable enough so that it can be changed as needed, if it becomes a problem, rather than a solution.
Why should duration be considered a measure of a constitution's success? The goal is to "provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare," etc. If it achieves this for 50 years, then is replaced by another that also succeeds for 50 years, is the result in any way worse than a constitution that lasts for 100?
Culture. Law and culture are symbiotic and complementary. One supports and sustains the other, if they are in conflict then either one dominates the other (resulting in anarchy or a police state, for example) or society pays the ongoing cost of that conflict (see the drug war, modern copyright law, etc.)<p>You can't just magic up a few pages of text and transmogrify it into "law" or a constitution. Constitutions that work are born from cultures with a history of the rule of law, and they represent a distillation of firmly held principles of the people. A good constitution represents a cheat sheet for the ideals of the people, and something that if all law were taken away a keen observer would still be able to identify the constitutional bullet points as extant aspects of society.