Chapter 3 Exercises

These exercises ask you to do constitutional analysis, not just constitutional recitation. The Constitution is read in real time by lawyers, judges, and citizens applying it to new questions. The goal here is to give you practice with that work — translating eighteenth-century language into contemporary meaning, tracing constitutional sources, steel-manning rival schools of interpretation, and locating yourself in the document as a citizen of an actual congressional district.

Exercise 1: Translate Article I, Section 8

Pull up the text of Article I, Section 8 (it is short — about 425 words). For each of the following clauses, write a one-sentence plain-English translation, then a one-sentence statement of what the modern Court has said the clause means.

  1. The Commerce Clause: "To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes."
  2. The Necessary and Proper Clause: "To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers."
  3. The Tax and Spending Clause: "To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States."
  4. The Declare War Clause: "To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water."
  5. The Coinage Clause: "To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin."

For the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause, also identify two leading Supreme Court cases — one giving the clause a broad reading and one giving it a narrow reading. (Hint: McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), Wickard v. Filburn (1942), United States v. Lopez (1995), NFIB v. Sebelius (2012) are good places to start.)

This exercise should run about 600–800 words of writing. Your goal is to demonstrate that you can move between three layers: the constitutional text, its plain-English meaning, and the Court's interpretive gloss.

Exercise 2: Find the Constitutional Source

For each of the following contemporary disputes, identify (a) the constitutional provisions on which the dispute primarily turns, (b) the strongest argument on each side rooted in those provisions, and (c) the leading Supreme Court case (if any) that has addressed the question. Three to five sentences per dispute.

  1. DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals). Can a President direct immigration enforcement officials not to deport a defined class of undocumented immigrants? Identify the relevant clauses (Article II's Take Care Clause is one starting point) and the leading case (DHS v. Regents, 2020).
  2. The Dobbs decision and abortion. What constitutional provisions did Roe (1973) and Casey (1992) rely on, and what did Dobbs (2022) say about them? You should be able to name the clauses (Due Process; potentially Equal Protection; potentially Ninth Amendment) and articulate the Dobbs majority's reading of original public meaning.
  3. The 2008 Heller decision and gun rights. What does the Second Amendment text say in full, including the prefatory clause? What did Heller (2008) and Bruen (2022) say it means? Where do the prefatory clause and the operative clause sit in the dispute?
  4. The 2023 federal student-loan forgiveness program (struck down in Biden v. Nebraska). What statute did the administration cite (the HEROES Act of 2003)? What constitutional doctrine did the Court use to require congressional clarity (the major questions doctrine)? Where does the major questions doctrine sit in the constitutional structure — is it textual, structural, or precedential?
  5. Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution (Trump v. United States, 2024). What constitutional provisions did the Court rely on? What is the distinction the Court drew between "official" and "unofficial" presidential acts, and where in the Constitution is that distinction grounded?

For each dispute, your goal is not to take a side but to locate the dispute in the constitutional text. A reader of your answers should be able to walk away knowing which clauses are doing the work, even without knowing your views on the merits.

Exercise 3: Steel-Man the Schools of Interpretation

Pick one of the following recent or pending Supreme Court cases:

  • District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) — Second Amendment individual right
  • Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) — same-sex marriage
  • Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health (2022) — abortion and the overturning of Roe
  • Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023) — race-conscious college admissions
  • Trump v. United States (2024) — presidential criminal immunity

For your chosen case:

  1. Write a 250-word steel-man of how an originalist would approach the case. Cite text and history. Identify what original public meaning would have to look like for the originalist's preferred outcome to follow. (Important: the steel-man does not have to agree with the actual Heller or Dobbs outcome — it must present the strongest originalist methodology applied to the question.)
  2. Write a 250-word steel-man of how a living constitutionalist would approach the same case. Identify which contemporary considerations the living-constitutional analysis treats as relevant and why.
  3. In a final 150 words, identify the one strongest objection that originalists make to the living-constitutional approach in this case, and the one strongest objection that living constitutionalists make to the originalist approach in this case.

A good answer demonstrates that you can think inside a methodology you do not share. That is the discipline of constitutional argument.

Exercise 4: Read an Amendment

Pick one of the following amendments. Investigate its passage and write a 400–500 word case study covering: (a) the political moment that made the amendment possible, (b) the ratifying coalition (which states ratified, in what order, with which majorities), (c) the practical effect — what was different in American life after the amendment that wasn't true before, (d) one important contemporary controversy or judicial interpretation that turns on the amendment.

  • The 13th Amendment (abolition of slavery, 1865)
  • The 17th Amendment (direct election of senators, 1913)
  • The 19th Amendment (women's suffrage, 1920)
  • The 21st Amendment (repeal of Prohibition, 1933)
  • The 24th Amendment (poll tax prohibition, 1964)
  • The 26th Amendment (18-year-old vote, 1971)

A useful exercise even on amendments you "know" — the political coalitions and the actual mechanics of ratification often surprise people who learned the amendments only as a list.

Exercise 5: Three-Fifths and the Compromises

Read the original Three-Fifths Clause carefully (Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 — quoted in the chapter). Then in 400 words:

  1. Calculate roughly how many additional House seats and electoral votes the slaveholding states gained from the clause in the 1790 census apportionment. (You will need rough population figures; encyclopedic sources will give you the slave-state and free-state populations. The math is approximate, not exact.)
  2. Identify two presidential elections before 1860 in which this advantage may have been decisive (consult any source on antebellum electoral history; the 1800 and 1828 elections are common candidates).
  3. Conclude with one paragraph reflecting on why the framers wrote "such Persons" and "three fifths of all other Persons" rather than "slaves" and "Africans." What does the euphemism reveal about the room?

This exercise asks you to do honest counting. It is the only way to take the moral measure of a compromise that was, in its time, defended as a moderation of a worse alternative.

Exercise 6: Article V Mechanics

Without looking at any source, explain in 200 words exactly how an amendment to the Constitution is adopted. Cover both proposal paths (Congressional and Convention) and both ratification paths (state legislatures and state ratifying conventions). Identify the supermajority thresholds at each step. Identify which of the four possible procedural combinations has actually been used for amendments. Identify what the exact number of states required for ratification is in 2026, and how that compares to what it was in 1788.

Then, in a second 200 words, sketch the strongest argument for raising the bar (making amendment harder) and the strongest argument for lowering the bar (making amendment easier). Pick a side and defend it in a final 100 words. (You are taking a normative position here; this is the one exercise in the chapter where you are explicitly asked to advocate.)

Exercise 7: Democracy Audit — Your Constitutional Footprint

For the congressional district where you currently live (or your home district, if you currently live somewhere temporary like a college town):

  1. Identify your two senators and your one representative. (Look them up; congress.gov is the authoritative source.)
  2. Look up the size of your district and your state's population (Census 2020). Calculate roughly how many constituents your representative has and how many constituents each of your senators has.
  3. Compare your senators' constituent count to the constituent count of senators from the most populous and least populous states. (As of 2024: California ~39M; Wyoming ~580K.) Calculate the per-capita representation ratio.
  4. Identify your district's representation under the Three-Fifths Clause hypothetical: if your state's enslaved population in 1790 had been zero, how would your state's House delegation in 1790 have been different? (For most states this calculation is moot or trivial. For Virginia, South Carolina, or Maryland it is significant. The point is to ground the abstraction in a concrete state.)

Write up your findings in 300–400 words. The point of this exercise is that constitutional structure is not abstract. It determines, very concretely, how much your vote weighs against the votes of citizens elsewhere.

Exercise 8: Norms and Rules

The chapter argues that the formal Constitution depends on the small-c constitution of unwritten norms. Identify three norms that are not in the written Constitution but that you think are essential to the system working. For each, write 100 words covering:

  1. What the norm is (in plain language).
  2. Whether the norm has been substantially observed in 2017–2026, partially observed, or substantially eroded.
  3. What you think is the appropriate constitutional or legal response, if any. (Codify into law? Restore through political pressure? Accept the change?)

A good answer is honest about the difficulty of this question. Many of these norms cannot be codified without changing the constitutional structure in ways that have other costs. Some can. Distinguishing the two is the work.

Exercise 9: Reading the Federalist Papers

Pick one of the following four essays from The Federalist. Each is a foundational defense of a specific design choice in the Constitution. Read the essay carefully (they are available free online at the Library of Congress and the Yale Avalon Project). Then write a 350–450 word response covering:

  1. Federalist 10 (Madison on faction). What is Madison's diagnosis of the problem of faction? How does the structure of an extended republic — meaning a country geographically and demographically large — solve the problem in his account? Where do you think the argument is strongest? Where does it strain when applied to a 21st-century continental polity with mass communication and national parties?
  2. Federalist 51 (Madison on separation of powers and "ambition counteracting ambition"). What is Madison's mechanism for keeping each branch in check? How does the mechanism depend on the personal interest of officeholders rather than on their virtue? How well has the mechanism held up — particularly in moments when one party controls all three elective branches and the same party's officeholders have shared partisan interests?
  3. Federalist 70 (Hamilton on executive energy). Why does Hamilton argue for a single executive rather than a council? How does he reconcile "energy in the executive" with constitutional limitation? Where do you think Hamilton's argument is most relevant to current debates over presidential power?
  4. Federalist 78 (Hamilton on the judiciary). Why does Hamilton call the judiciary "the least dangerous branch"? How does he defend judicial review (without using the term)? Has the modern Court behaved as Hamilton predicted?

Your goal in this exercise is to read a primary source carefully and to engage with its argument on its strongest terms. Do not write a summary. Write an engagement.

Exercise 10: Counting the Three-Fifths Effect

This exercise extends Exercise 5 with a more rigorous counting analysis. Using the 1790 census data (available from the U.S. Census Bureau historical files; many secondary sources also reproduce it), do the following calculation:

  1. Start with each state's free population and enslaved population.
  2. Calculate each state's effective population for House apportionment under the Three-Fifths Clause: free population + (3/5 × enslaved population).
  3. Calculate each state's House delegation under the original 1790 apportionment (the Constitution set a temporary apportionment until the first census; thereafter Congress passed apportionment laws). Use the 1792 Apportionment Act ratio (1 representative per 33,000 people).
  4. Now calculate the same House delegation under a hypothetical "no enslaved people counted" rule (free population only).
  5. The difference between (3) and (4) is the slave-state seat advantage from the Three-Fifths Clause in 1790.

Write up your findings in 250–300 words. Identify the three states that gained the most seats from the Three-Fifths Clause and the three that gained the least (or zero). Reflect on what this calculation demonstrates about the political economy of the founding compromise.

This is a quantitative exercise. The math is not difficult, but it requires care. Show your work.