by all thirteen state legislatures. ⁹ This extremely wooden provision, which
served as an effective obstacle to any legal constitutional changes during
the life of the Articles, was eventually bypassed in formulating a new Con-
stitution, ¹⁰ a document that was, by terms of Article VII, to go into effect
when ratified by nine or more of the states. ¹¹

There was a general recognition at the Philadelphia Convention that a
more effective mechanism for constitutional change would be necessary
than that under the Articles. Delegates to the convention knew that the
American Revolution had been heralded by a Declaration which proclaimed
that government rested on the "consent of the governed" and which es-
poused the right of the people "to alter or abolish" their government. Such
a revolutionary right could prove dangerous unless channeled by regularized
constitutional mechanisms. In terminology that would later become pop-
ular, the new machine needed a "safety-valve." ¹² Thus Colonel Mason noted
at the Constitutional Convention that

The plan now to be formed will certainly be defective, as the Confederation has
been found on trial to be. Amendments therefore will be necessary, and it will be
better to provide for them, in an easy, regular and Constitutional way than to trust
chance and violence. ¹³

Delegates to the convention expressed some disagreement as to which
institution of government should be responsible for amendments and by
what majorities they should be adopted. ¹⁴ The result of this deliberation
was Article V, a provision defended by James Madison in Federalist No. 43
as "stamped with every mark of propriety." He went on to describe it as
guarding "equally against that extreme facility, which would render the
Constitution too mutable; and that extreme difficulty, which might per-
petuate its discovered faults." ¹⁵ This article divided constitutional amend-
ment into two stages: proposal and ratification. Amendments may be
proposed by two-thirds majorities of both houses of Congress or by a
convention called by Congress at the request of two-thirds of the states.
Amendments are, in turn, ratified by three-fourths of the state legislatures,
or by special state conventions. ¹⁶ Although it has been argued that the latter
mode of ratification is preferable, ¹⁷ the former mode is the more common
procedure, having been utilized for all but one amendment ratified to date. ¹⁸

There is no provision in the national Constitution, as in some state doc-
uments, for periodic constitutional revision, but there were some thinkers
in early America who favored such a mechanism. Prominent among them
was Thomas Jefferson, who emerged in his Notes of the State of Virginia as

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