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The pragmatist objection is central to the idea that the Constitution should be seen as a living document. Under that view, for example, constitutional requirements of "equal rights" should be read with regard to current standards of equality, not those of decades or centuries ago, an alternative that would be unacceptable.
A living document, also known as an evergreen document or dynamic document, is a document that is continually edited and updated. [1] An example of a living document is an article in Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that permits anyone to freely edit its articles; this is in contrast to "dead" or "static" documents, such as an article in a single edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica.
A codified constitution is a constitution that is contained in a single document, which is the single source of constitutional law in a state. An uncodified constitution is one that is not contained in a single document, but consists of several different sources, which may be written or unwritten.
A codified constitution is a single document; states that do not have such a document have uncodified, but not entirely unwritten, constitutions, since much of an uncodified constitution is usually written in laws such as the Basic Laws of Israel and the Parliament Acts of the United Kingdom. Uncodified constitutions largely lack protection ...
For example, in Pennsylvania, over several elections, the congressional elections in districts drawn by the Republican legislature resulted in Democrats' receiving between 45% and 51% of the ...
One counterargument is that the Constitution is a "living document" that has survived for over 200 years because not everything is "spelled out." In the area of the War Powers Clause, the flexibility provided by the requirement for a congressional statute for a declaration of war and constitutional interpretation could be sufficient.
The U.S. Constitution was a federal one and was greatly influenced by the study of Magna Carta and other federations, both ancient and extant. The Due Process Clause of the Constitution was partly based on common law and on Magna Carta (1215), which had become a foundation of English liberty against arbitrary power wielded by a ruler.
The Guarantee Clause of Article 4 of the Constitution states that "The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government." These two provisions indicate states did not surrender their wide latitude to adopt a constitution, the fundamental documents of state law, when the U.S. Constitution was adopted.