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In his book The Dignity of Legislation, Jeremy Waldron bemoans the lack of attention legal philosophers have paid to legislatures and legislation. This oversight, Waldron suggests, has impoverished our understanding of legislatures as legal institutions, and has led jurisprudes to see only the “indignity of legislation.” Legal historians have hardly been more attentive, preferring to leave legislatures to political historians and political scientists. So although we have myriad studies of roll call votes, for example, we lack a genuine understanding of the legal history of legislatures or legislation. Our failure to appreciate the role of legislatures and legislation is especially characteristic of studies of the pre-Civil War period, a period in which the state has been famously described as a “state of courts and parties,” and characterized by the legislature's “decline of authority.” Even those who have uncovered a rich governmental theory and practice in the nineteenth century have focused more on courts and statutory interpretation. Willard Hurst criticized this inattention to the legal history of legislatures years ago, noting the “tendency to identify legal history with the history of courts and court-made doctrine.” Our court-centered approach has left us with only a partial understanding of the role of law in American history. “In order to see law in its relations to the society as a whole,” Hurst continued, “one must appraise all formal and informal aspects of political organized power— observe the functions of all agencies (legislative, executive, administrative, or judicial) and take account of the interplay of such agencies with voters and nonvoters, lobbyists and interest groups, politicians and political parties. This definition overruns traditional boundaries dividing the study of law from study of political history, political science, and sociology.”

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Can an Article V convention be limited? While there is an emerging consensus that it can, in this paper I focus on John A. Jameson's legal treatise on constitutional conventions and the jurisprudence it spawned to help round out our understanding of both Article V in particular, and of constitutional revision more generally. Jameson's treatise was directed to the larger question of whether constitutional conventions in general could be limited. Since its initial publication in 1867, courts have relied upon Jameson's insights to build a law of constitutional conventions at the state level. Several components of this jurisprudence are particularly relevant to Article V, including the distinction between constitutional and revolutionary conventions, the distinction between amendment and revision, and the requirements of convention acts and ratification votes, in addition to the preclusion of a robust role for the electorate in the Article V convention process. This jurisprudence is readily available for courts to help guide them in determining the nature and limits of an Article V convention.