Sources

Verbatim text

All verbatim text of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the remaining amendments, and the Declaration of Independence on this site is taken from the National Archives.

• Constitution of the United States: archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript
• Bill of Rights (Amendments 1–10): archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights-transcript
• Amendments 11–27: archives.gov/founding-docs/amendments-11-27
• Declaration of Independence: archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript

The verbatim text was retrieved from these pages on April 30, 2026. Each amendment and article page on this site shows the source URL and retrieval date in its metadata.

Cross-checking

The National Archives transcripts include the text as ratified, with original capitalization and spelling preserved. Where the Archives notes text that has been superseded by a later amendment (for example, the original method of selecting senators in Article I, Section 3, superseded by the Seventeenth Amendment), we have preserved the original text as written and added an inline note pointing to the amendment that changed it. Nothing has been silently rewritten.

We also cross-checked the verbatim text against:

• The official literal print of the Constitution prepared for the Senate by the Office of the Secretary of the Senate
• The Library of Congress digital transcripts

Where these sources differed in minor ways (typographical choices, line breaks), we followed the National Archives.

Plain-English layer

The plain-English translations on this site were drafted by the editorial team and reviewed by attorneys before publication. They are not from any third-party source. They are released under a Creative Commons Attribution license, meaning anyone can reuse them as long as they credit freeconstitution.org.

Editorial decisions

Word-by-word reasoning behind specific translation choices is published in the editorial notes section. This includes choices like:

• Why we kept establish instead of create
• Why we translated posterity as generations who come after us rather than future generations
• Why we did not paraphrase the Second Amendment beyond hyphenation and sentence-break corrections

The notes are public so that anyone can see, and challenge, the reasoning behind the wording.

Court interpretation

Where amendment pages refer to how courts have interpreted a provision, we have not cited specific cases inline because case citations make pages harder to read for non-lawyers. Where a single court decision is the current controlling law on a contested question — for example, Trump v. Anderson (2024) on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment — we have named it on the relevant page.

If you want to read the cases yourself, Oyez has free audio recordings and case summaries for Supreme Court decisions. CourtListener has full opinions and lower-court rulings.

When this page was last updated

See the footer of this page for the most recent update date. Material changes to verbatim text (which would only happen if a new amendment is ratified) will be noted on the homepage.