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This chapter contains documents shedding light on how Kashmir’s Constitution was framed from 1954 to 1956. This includes the reports of the Basic Principles Committee and the Drafting Committee presented on 3 February and 11 February 1954, respectively; the President’s Major Order under Article 370, CO No. 48, entitled The Constitution Order 1954. It describes how the Constituent Assembly resolved on 6 April 1955 to authorise the President to extend to the state entries in the Union list, how the Assembly amended the State Constitution that led to the drafting and revision of the Constitution. On 17 November 1956, the Constituent Assembly adopted a Resolution moved by Mir Qasim that it shall stand dissolved from 26 January 1957. The President of the Constituent Assembly formally declared its dissolution pursuant to the resolution of 17 November.

This chapter proposes that state constitutional reform stabilizes national politics. Specifically, the chapter posits that members of Congress, presidents, and federal judges defer divisive constitutional controversies to the states, which revise their constitutions to address these issues. Reformers rebuffed by the national branches too look to the states. Resulting state constitutional revision pre-empts national reform and stabilizes national politics. The chapter offers preliminary evidence for this theory using original datasets on proposed federal and state constitutional reform. This theory and evidence suggest that to fully understand American constitutional and political development, one needs to study state constitutional change.

This chapter examines the formation of the various committees of the newly formed sovereign state of Mississippi, and the problems that followed the creation of those committees. Following the secession, the delegates shifted their attention to politics, economics, law, and society. The change made up the “second phase” of the Mississippi Secession Convention. They looked into what actions to take to make sure Mississippi was able to take care of itself, whether alone or in a new confederacy. On the span of three days, January 10–12, President William Barry established the following standing committees: Committee on Citizenship in Mississippi, Committee on Federal Jurisdiction and Property, Committee on Postal, Financial and Commercial Affairs, Committee on the State Constitution, Committee on Military and Naval Affairs, and Committee on Southern Confederacy. Yet no sooner had Barry appointed the committees than the delegates began to offer their own resolutions apart from any committee's oversight.

This chapter investigates the period between the federal Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the revision of the Pennsylvania State Constitution in 1790. Debates over the ratification of the US Constitution grew out of and reflected long-running Pennsylvanian debates over ideal forms of government. These debates—rhetorically and literally violent—saw Federalists adopt the language of their Anti-Federalist opponents in using popular sovereignty and a participatory political culture to justify their new frame of government. This widened debates on governmental reform to include extra-governmental activism alongside formal structures of government. Thus the success of Pennsylvanian Federalists in revising the state constitution in 1790 was only possible through legitimizing extra-governmental mobilization—which in turn ensured that the spirit of the 1776 constitution remained at the heart of Pennsylvanian politics.

This chapter distils the six main interlinking principles of religious freedom collectively embraced by the eighteenth-century American founders – liberty of conscience, free exercise of religion, religious pluralism, religious equality, separation of church and state, and disestablishment of (at least a national) religion. It shows the different and sometimes competing logics that the founders used to support these principles, and the expression and application of these principles in the new state constitutions of the 1770s and 1780s. The chapter traces the roots and routes of these religious freedom principles in the earlier Western legal tradition, but also shows how the principles of religious equality for all peaceable faiths and no establishment of any religion by law were largely new creations and distinctive features of the American constitutional experiment.

Aside from Ohio Territory, neighboring states attempted to provide similar benefits for some of its free residents as Sarah and Abraham Whipple perceived that they had achieved respect, prosperity, and security in the new settlement. Also, the welfare of the citizens was one of the fundamental concerns of the government's new republican system. Although the conventions of eleven states have already ratified the United States Constitution, North Carolina and Rhode Island desisted from giving support to the new national authority structure. As such, the Marietta community had reason to draw attention to the future of the settlement and to further occupation of Ohio. This chapter looks into the effects of the second Indian unrest, as well as the important events in Ohio between 1789 and 1819.