19 · Capstone: trace one constitution's making and classify its system
This course is open while its review is still in progress. Every course here gets a source-by-source citation review before it is marked reviewed; this one has not finished that process yet. How review works
You can now read a constitution on three axes and name the four routes by which one gets made. Use both on a single real country. Pick one national constitution, trace HOW it was made, and classify the SYSTEM it produced, all from the primary documents.
One boundary before you start, restated because a capstone is where people forget it: this is a research exercise in reading authority, not legal advice. You are building an account of how a constitution came to be and how it holds power. You are not determining anyone's legal rights, and you are not opining on any live constitutional or political dispute; where a classification or an origin is contested, your job is to report what the documents establish and to flag what is disputed, exactly as the course did for semi-presidentialism, for the US 'runaway convention' question, and for how imposed Japan's constitution was.
The assignment
Produce a one-page constitutional profile of a country of your choice. It has two parts: a MAKING story (which route, from the record) and a CLASSIFICATION (the three axes, from the text). The finding is the argument and the sources, not the prose. Aim for a profile you could defend to someone who picked the opposite reading on any contested point.
Part A. Trace the making
Answer, from the historical and documentary record:
| Question | What you are looking for |
|---|---|
| Which route? | Convention, negotiated transition, imposition after defeat, or reconstruction under occupation (or a mix, or another route entirely) |
| Who held the constituent power? | A convention of delegates, negotiating parties, an elected assembly, an occupier, a court, or some combination |
| What were the steps and dates? | Drafting, adoption, ratification or certification, coming into force, with the documents that record each |
Name the gap between "the people" and who actually drafted and adopted the text, the honest observation from Lesson 13. If your case does not fit one clean route, say so and say why; a mixed or novel route is a real finding, not a failure.
Part B. Classify the system
Place the constitution on the three axes, citing the clause for each:
| Axis | What to determine, and where to look |
|---|---|
| Horizontal | Presidential, parliamentary, or semi-presidential: who holds executive power and how it links to the legislature |
| Territorial | Federal or unitary: can the center, alone, abolish the region or strip its powers? |
| Form | Codified or uncodified, and rigid or flexible: is it one entrenched document, and how hard is it to amend? |
Quote the clause that settles each axis where you can (the article vesting executive power, the amendment article, the provision dividing the center from the regions). If your country is a hard case on any axis (a contested semi-presidential label, a federal-or-unitary blur), do not fake a clean answer: state what the document establishes and name precisely what is disputed.
Rules you do not get to break
- From the documents, not from memory. Every claim ties to something you can cite: a constitutional article, a founding statute, a court judgment, a national archive record.
- No invented clause, case, date, or figure. If you cannot source it, it does not go in the profile, or it goes in flagged "unverified."
- Report facts flatly; flag disputes as disputes. A date of ratification is usually settled; whether a system is 'semi-presidential' or how 'imposed' a constitution was can be contested. Do not blur the two.
- Origin and legitimacy are different questions. A constitution can begin under pressure and be owned by a people over time (Japan), or be made by an unauthorised convention and endure (the United States). Describe the origin; do not use it to score the country.
- This is not legal advice, and your page should say so at the top, because someone else may read it.
What good looks like
A one-page profile in which the making route is named and dated from the record, the system is placed on all three axes with a clause cited for each, and every contested point is labeled as contested rather than smoothed over. If you took a constitution you thought you understood and showed, from its own text and its own founding record, both HOW it was made and exactly WHAT kind of system it is, you have done what this course set out to teach: you learned to read the document course 1 kept walking the chain up to, and to see where it came from.
Sources
- U.S. Const. art. V; art. VII. https://constitution.congress.gov/
- Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996. https://www.gov.za/documents/constitution-republic-south-africa-1996
- Elkins, Z., Ginsburg, T., & Melton, J. (2009). The endurance of national constitutions. Cambridge University Press.