Driss-A-Blog

"The design of the Progress Clause [supra] reflects something about the Constitution's design in general. To avoid a problem, the framers built structure. To prevent the concentrated power of publishers, they built a structure that kept copyrights away from publishers and kept them short. To prevent the concentrated power of a church, they banned the federal government from establishing a church. To prevent concentrating power in the federal government, they built structures to reinforce the power of the states - including the Senate, whose members were at the time selected by the states, and an electoral college, also selected by the states, to select the president. In each case, a structure built checks and balances into the constitutional frame, structured to prevent otherwise inevitable concentrations of power" (Lessig, Free Culture. p131).
Similarly, the Torah has ideals that it upholds, and to reinforce and protect these ideals, the Rabbis created structures around them. For example, Jews are not permitted to write on Shabbat; the structure around that rule is that you are not allowed to pick up the writing instrument.
The fact that these two written documents are similar in structure should be noted. But then, this is just one more example of how our founding fathers might've been influenced by Judaism.

(post-script: neglected to mention.. I have completed 13 pages of my paper. Only 17 to go! WHOO HOO!)