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12 Const. Comment. 171 (1995)
The Nominee is. . .Article V

handle is hein.journals/ccum12 and id is 179 raw text is: THE NOMINEE IS ... ARTICLE V Stephen M. Griffin* In any list of least favorite constitutional provisions, we should not ignore the provisions protecting slavery, such as Arti- cle I § 9 cl. 1 (providing that the slave trade could not be prohib- ited prior to 1808) and Article IV § 2 cl. 3 (the fugitive slave clause). These provisions may have been superseded, but they have not been expunged from the text and they should not be forgotten. That said, there are a number of constitutional provisions that have always struck me as questionable. Article I § 4 leaves the procedures for holding federal elections in the hands of the states., This has meant that there has never been a uniform law of voter registration (contributing to election fraud and lower turnout in the twentieth century) or a uniform federal ballot (leading to voter confusion in some states). The method of presi- dential election specified in Article II § 1 was an unstable com- promise, resulting in the need for the Twelfth Amendment only fourteen years after the Constitution was ratified. It would also have been better had the Framers tried to define at least a mini- mal conception of the judicial power in Article In § 1 (or, for that matter, the executive power in Article II § 1). My nominee, however, is Article V, which has historically operated to make the Constitution very difficult to amend.2 It is true that the question of how to provide for change poses diffi- cult choices for those who create a constitution. If the constitu- tion makes change too easy, there is a risk that the constitution will not structure politics, but will be hostage to it. But making change too difficult may cause political instability or force change to occur through a non-constitutional process. The procedure for change that the Framers provided in Article V appears to reflect a judgment that making change too easy is the greater danger. * Associate Professor of Law, Tulane University. 1. See the contribution of Jeffrey Rosen to this symposium. 2. On matters of amendment and much more, see Sanford Levinson, ed., Respond- ing to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment (Princeton U. Press, 1995).

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