The Supreme Court's authority to declare laws unconstitutional—its main function today—is not explicitly mentioned in Article 3. This power of judicial review was established by the Court itself in the early 19th century, fundamentally shaping its role in the U.S. government's balance of powers.

Historian Jill Lepore argues that judicial originalism is not history. It artificially limits its sources to a few legal documents like the Federalist Papers, ignoring the broader context a professional historian would use. This creates a skewed, lawyerly version of the past rather than a genuine historical understanding.

The legal strategy to defend segregation in Brown v. Board was explicitly originalist, arguing the 14th Amendment's framers never intended to desegregate schools. This argument, architected by lawyer David J. Mays, formed an intellectual bridge to the formal originalism developed by Robert Bork in the 1970s.

The over 12,000 failed attempts to amend the Constitution are not just legislative footnotes; they constitute a meaningful archive of what the American people have wanted from their government but were unable to achieve, offering a people's history of constitutional desires.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was convened primarily because the Articles of Confederation required unanimous consent for amendments. This allowed a single state, 'Rogue' Rhode Island, to repeatedly block necessary changes, proving the system was unworkable and necessitating a complete replacement.

The judicial theory of "originalism" seeks to interpret laws based on their meaning at the time of enactment. This creates demand for AI tools that can perform large-scale historical linguistic analysis ("corpus linguistics"), effectively outsourcing a component of legal reasoning to AI.

Viewing the Roberts Court as a single, unbroken entity is misleading. Its early phase was a 5-4 court where Justice Kennedy often sided with liberals, creating a sense of balance. His retirement and the appointment of three Trump justices created a new, more predictably conservative and lopsided era.

Historian Anne Applebaum observes that significant US constitutional amendments often follow profound national traumas like the Revolution or the Civil War. This suggests that without a similar large-scale crisis, mustering the collective will to address deep-seated issues like systemic corruption is historically difficult, as there is no single moment of reckoning.

The framers, haunted by the violence of the Revolutionary War, intentionally designed Article V as a mechanism for peaceful change. They saw it as a crucial innovation to prevent future bloody insurrections when the government acts unconstitutionally, offering a path for reform instead of rebellion.