Below are some introductory resources to the U.S. Constitution, including Amendments to the Constitution.
Search Tip: If you need information about a specific amendment, you can use the blue Gateway Search box. Please use the following as your search terms (typed in the quotations and including the plus sign): "# Amendment" + "U.S. Constitution." Click the check mark next to "Full Text" to ensure you will be able to read the results of your search.
If you're not getting relevant search results by typing in "14th Amendment" try typing the number as a word: "Fourteenth Amendment."
The U.S. Constitution: a Very Short Introduction by
This book explores the major themes that have shaped American constitutional history: federalism, the balance of powers, property, representation, equality, rights, and security. Informed by the latest scholarship, this book places constitutional history within the context of American political and social history.
Constitutional Amendments by
Constitutional Amendments: Making, Breaking, and Changing Constitutions is both a roadmap for navigating the intellectual universe of constitutional amendments and a blueprint for building and improving the rules of constitutional change. Drawing from dozens of constitutions in every region ofthe world, this book blends theory with practice to answer two all-important questions: what is an amendment and how should constitutional designers structure the procedures of constitutional change? The first matters now more than ever. Reformers are exploiting the rules of constitutionalamendment, testing the limits of legal constraint, undermining the norms of democratic government, and flouting the constitution as written to create entirely new constitutions that masquerade as ordinary amendments. The second question is central to the performance and endurance of constitutions.Constitutional designers today have virtually no resources to guide them in constructing the rules of amendment, and scholars do not have a clear portrait of the significance of amendment rules in the project of constitutionalism.This book shows that no part of a constitution is more important than the procedures we use change it. Amendment rules open a window into the soul of a constitution, exposing its deepest vulnerabilities and revealing its greatest strengths. The codification of amendment rules often at the end of thetext proves that last is not always least.