CONSTITUTION - Article V - Independence Institute

What the 1777 Georgia Constitution Tells Us About the Article V Convention Process 0
- June 17, 2016
When interpreting a legal document, you often can get clues from looking at any predecessors to the document. For example, what did earlier drafts say? What did previous documents that served as models provide? Did the framers of the final version mirror earlier wording, or did they change it? If a phrase in an earlier
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Legislative Reapportionment: The Supreme Court Steps Back 0
- June 5, 2016
This article originally appeared in The American Spectator The Supreme Court recently stepped back from its campaign to impose its political preferences on the states. In Evenwel v. Abbott, the justices held while the U.S. Constitution requires states to apportion their legislatures solely by population, the Constitution does not prescribe a particular way of counting
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The 4th Edition of Prof. Natelson’s Article V Treatise Is Now Here!!0
- May 19, 2016
In 2014 the first legal treatise ever on the Constitution’s amendment process was published: Prof. Rob Natelson’s work, State Initiation of Constitutional Amendments: A Guide for Lawyers and Legislative Drafters. The work was commissioned by the Convention of States Project of Citizens for Self Governance. Over the past two years, the treatise has undergone updating and expansion.
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Cruz Withdrawal Postpones “Natural Born” Issue 0
- May 15, 2016
This article first appeared in the Forth Worth Star Telegram. A silver lining to the withdrawal of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, from the presidential race is that we will be spared a battle over whether he met the Constitution’s requirement the president be a “natural born citizen.” The evidence is not all one way, but
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Is the “Compact for America” Procedure to Amend the Constitution Constitutional?—An Update 0
- May 10, 2016
Because of widespread interest in the Article V Information Center’s report on the legality of the “Compact for America” approach to amending the Constitution, we are reprinting it here. Distilled to its essence, the “Compact” approach is unconstitutional because it seeks to change, through state legislative action (statutes and interstate compacts), the amendment procedure specified in
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Newly-Published Ratification Documents Confirm Our Conclusions on the Amendment Process 0
- May 9, 2016
The Wisconsin Historical Society publishes successive volumes of the Documentary History of the Constitution of the United States. As its name indicates, the Documentary History is a multi-volume set of books containing documents from the debates over the Constitution’s ratification. The Wisconsin Historical Society published fairly recently two volumes from the debates in Maryland. There
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