Free Constitution.

About this site

What this is

freeconstitution.org is a free, ad-free, account-free reference site for the United States Constitution. The full verbatim text of the Constitution and all 27 amendments is here, along with a plain-English version of each section, and short cards for situations where knowing your rights matters.

You do not need to sign up. You do not need to give us an email. There are no ads. There is no tracking beyond basic anonymous server logs. The whole site is meant to load fast on a slow phone and read clearly to anyone — including readers who are not lawyers, who learned English as a second language, or whose brains work differently from the assumptions academic writing tends to make.

Think of it as a pocket guide.

What this is not

This is not legal advice. We are not your lawyer. The plain-English versions on this site are written carefully and reviewed by attorneys, but they cannot tell you what to do in your specific situation. If you need legal help, contact a lawyer or your state's ACLU affiliate.

This is not a court. The Constitution and its amendments mean what courts say they mean, and courts continue to interpret them. We have tried to flag the most actively contested questions on each amendment page, but the law changes. If you are reading this years after it was written, check whether anything has been updated.

This is not the only source. The official source for the Constitution is the National Archives. Every page on this site links back to the Archives transcript so you can compare.

How we wrote it

Every amendment and article on this site has four parts:

  1. Verbatim — the exact text as ratified, taken from the National Archives.
  2. Plain English — a translation that drops archaic words but keeps the meaning, including the ambiguities that lawyers and judges still argue about. We do not resolve those ambiguities for you.
  3. What this means for you (rights amendments) or About (structural amendments) — a short explanation of how the section affects everyday life, with notes on how courts have interpreted it.
  4. Notes on supersession or repeal — where one amendment has changed or replaced another, we say so inline.

Where words are still legally meaningful but no longer in everyday use, we kept them and explained them. Where words are simply old-fashioned ways of saying something modern (ordain for establish, posterity for future generations), we updated them.

Who reviews this

Before public launch, every page is reviewed by attorneys:

  • The Bill of Rights and the Preamble are reviewed by a civil rights attorney and a criminal defense attorney.
  • The Reconstruction and voting amendments (13, 14, 15, 19, 24, 26) are reviewed by a civil rights attorney.
  • The Articles are reviewed by a constitutional law professor.
  • Other amendments are reviewed by the same professor, and may launch with a "Pending review" label until that review is complete.
  • The "Turned away from voting" Situations card is additionally reviewed by an election protection lawyer.

Each page shows the date of its most recent review and the name of the reviewer. If a page has not yet been reviewed, it says so clearly.

Who is behind this

This is a project of [organization name pending], a nonprofit based in Flagstaff, Arizona. We are a small team. We do not take ad money. We do not sell data. We do not run on donations from anyone whose name we cannot share publicly.

If you want to help, the most useful thing you can do is share the site with someone who needs it. The second most useful thing is to tell us when we got something wrong. Contact information is on the homepage footer.

Editorial process

Our full editorial process — how we make decisions about wording, how we handle disagreements between reviewers, how we update pages when courts hand down new rulings — is documented publicly. See the editorial notes for word-by-word reasoning behind specific translation choices. See PROCESS on the project's source repository for the full governance document.

This site is open source. Anyone can read the code, see the full revision history, and propose changes.

Translations

We plan to add Spanish translations once the English site is fully reviewed and stable. If you can help translate or review translations in any language, please reach out.