Constitution Now

Structure and Function

The course’s first track: how the Constitution allocates power among the branches and between the national government and the states. Your Topic 1 event lives here, built across Activities 2 through 6, with the core doctrine in Activities 4 and 5.

Individual Rights

The course’s second track: the protections a person can assert against government action, running from speech and religion through due process, criminal procedure, and equal protection. Your Topic 2 event lives here, built across Activities 7 through 12.

Constitutional Issue

The precise legal question inside a news story, stated as a provision plus a doctrine. “The order was controversial” is politics; “whether the order exceeds the President’s Article II authority” is a constitutional issue. Finding it is the project’s first move.

Precedent

The prior decisions that frame how a new dispute will be argued and resolved. Connecting your event to at least two cases from the course is how you show the story has legal roots, and a misattributed holding is the fastest way to lose a reader’s trust, which is why every case claim gets verified.

Levels of Scrutiny

The three-tier review framework from Activity 8 that recurs across speech, religion, due process, and equal protection. If your rights story involves a court weighing a law against a right, name the tier in play; it usually predicts the outcome.

Verified AI Insight

An AI-generated observation you feature only after confirming its factual claims against an authoritative source, with the check documented. The course’s standing rule applies to the capstone: the model drafts and you verify, and the documented check is part of the work.

Part 1: Choose Your Two Events

Pick two events from the last one to two years, each raising a genuine constitutional question. Topic 1 is Structure and Function: an event involving federalism, separation of powers, executive authority, the role of Congress or the courts, emergency powers, or a clash between state and federal governments, the terrain Activities 2 through 6 mapped. Topic 2 is Individual Rights: an event centered on a constitutional right, whether one the course covered in depth (speech and religion in Activity 8, due process in Activity 9, search, self-incrimination, counsel, and juries in Activity 10, equal protection in Activity 11) or one it touched more lightly, such as the Second Amendment or the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Use the Event Scout to generate candidates, then confirm each event is real and accurately described before committing to it. An event you cannot verify is not an event you can cover.

Part 2: Build the Legal Spine

For each event, state the constitutional issue precisely and connect it to at least two concepts or cases from the course, noting which activity each came from. Run the Case Connector to surface candidate precedents, then verify every case it names on Oyez or in the opinion itself before it goes into your project; a misattributed holding in a published piece is exactly the error this course spent twelve activities teaching you to catch. If your rights story involves a court weighing a law against a right, identify the level of scrutiny in play and say what it predicts.

Part 3: Produce the Presentation

Create a five-page visual and written presentation for each topic, ten pages in all. Each topic’s five pages open with a headline and photo that introduce the event the way a magazine would, followed by a short narrative telling what happened in clear and lively prose and an explanation of the constitutional issue involved. Each must also connect the event to at least two concepts or cases from the course, feature at least one verified AI-assisted insight with a line documenting how you confirmed it, and close with a brief reflection on why the story matters to you and what you learned. Write the reflection yourself, in your own voice; it should answer why this story is about the Constitution’s role rather than just the day’s politics. Use the Headline Desk for your front pages and run the Insight Auditor before any AI observation goes in. Submit the project as a PDF with visuals and text (you do not need to fill each page with words; get creative with the photography, like a magazine spread), a PowerPoint or Google Slides deck, a 5–8 minute video with supporting visuals, or another creative format that meets the content requirements.

Part 4: Share Chat Link

Include one AI chat link with a 1–2 sentence explanation of what the conversation shows and why you chose to share it.

The Event Scout

You are a legal news researcher helping a college constitutional law student find a capstone story. Ask me which track I am hunting for: a structural event (federalism, separation of powers, executive authority, emergency powers, or a state-federal clash) or an individual rights event (involving the First, Second, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, or Fourteenth Amendment). Then use your web search tool to suggest two or three real events from the last two years that raise a genuine constitutional question on that track. For each, explain the legal question in a sentence or two and cite the sources you relied on so I can confirm the event happened as described. Prefer events with an identifiable court case or government action at their center over general controversies.

Requiring live search with citations keeps the model out of its weakest territory, recent events recalled from memory, and the citation requirement makes every suggestion checkable before you commit a project to it.

The Case Connector

Here is a brief description of a current event I am covering: [insert]. Identify one or two landmark Supreme Court cases that bear on the constitutional issue this event raises. For each, give the case name and year precisely, explain the holding, and show the connection to my event: does the event apply the ruling, test its limits, extend its logic, or invite a court to revisit it? Flag any case where you are uncertain about the holding or the connection, because I will verify every case you name on Oyez or in the opinion itself before it appears in my project.

Announcing verification changes what the model produces: it hedges honestly instead of asserting everything with equal confidence, and the flags become your checking priority list.

The Headline Desk

I am creating a magazine-style presentation on a constitutional current event for a college audience. Here is a summary of the event: [insert]. Suggest three candidate headlines and, for each, a one-line photo caption that frames the constitutional stakes rather than the politics. Keep each headline under ten words and avoid clickbait. Make at least one of the three lead with the constitutional question itself.

Asking for multiple constrained options instead of one answer turns the model into a brainstorming partner while keeping the editorial judgment with you; the constraints are what make the output usable rather than generic.

The Insight Auditor

I plan to feature the following AI-generated insight in a published project: [paste the insight]. Extract every checkable claim it contains: case names and holdings, dates, vote counts, quotations, and factual assertions about the event. Present them as a numbered list, rate your confidence in each as high, medium, or low, and name the fastest authoritative source to verify each one (the Oyez summary, the Constitution Annotated essay, the opinion itself, or a primary news source). Do not revise the insight; produce only the audit.

Claim extraction converts a persuasive paragraph into a discrete verification checklist, and keeping extraction separate from correction matters: your job is to check the primary sources, and the documented check is what turns an AI insight into a verified one.