Monday 24 March 2014

I love to study the Constitution and it's precepts. In my studies I've noticed that all Constitution copies fail to annotate the changes made by...

It seems from your question that you think published copies of the Constitution ought to reference those portions of the document that are modified or rendered moot or irrelevant by amendments. For example, those parts of the Constitution that reference slavery were amended out of relevance by the Thirteenth Amendment (e.g., the "other persons" in Article I, Section 2 and the persons "Held to Service or Labour" in Article IV, Section 3) and published copies...

It seems from your question that you think published copies of the Constitution ought to reference those portions of the document that are modified or rendered moot or irrelevant by amendments. For example, those parts of the Constitution that reference slavery were amended out of relevance by the Thirteenth Amendment (e.g., the "other persons" in Article I, Section 2 and the persons "Held to Service or Labour" in Article IV, Section 3) and published copies of the Constitution ought to reflect this. I would point out that many published versions of the document, notably those in many textbooks, are actually annotated in the way you describe. Typically this is done by including amended clauses in red, or by crossing them out in such a way that they are still legible.


But the Bill of Rights actually did not make any such changes. None of first ten amendments substantively altered any of the clauses of the Constitution in the way that, say, the Twelfth, Thirteenth, or later amendments did. They may have changed the way we interpret the Constitution as a whole inasmuch as they placed limits on the powers of the federal government, but they did not change the language of the document itself. So they would not appear in the types of annotations described in the question.


N.B. For an annotated copy of the Constitution that reflects the substantive changes made by amendments, see the link below. 

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