To be sure, utilizing English language sources is potentially problematic. Translation of constitutional concepts across legal cultures is fraught with difficulty. For example, the French "Conseil Constitutionel" plays some functions that are akin to those played by constitutional courts in other countries (abstract, pre-promulgation constitutional review of legislation), but has been characterized as quasi-legislative in character (Hofnung 1996; Shapiro and Stone Sweet 2002). We hope that a catalog of the various powers of constitutional institutions will help to elucidate these differences, but recognize that translation problems form an inherent challenge to our work. Despite these difficulties, we will utilize English translations wherever available; in the event we cannot find an English version, we will seek to have the text coded by someone with native linguistic skills. In our pilot testing, we utilized coders with a range of language skills and in several instances have coded constitutions in both their original language and in translation. We intend to use these cases to assess the distorting effects of translation.