US Constitution

PLA 1003Activity 4·10 min read

Why it Matters

Almost every legal argument you will ever read traces back to the Constitution. It creates the government, divides its power, and sets the outer limits of what any official can do to a person. When a lawyer challenges a statute, attacks an agency action, or defends a client’s rights, the question underneath is usually whether the Constitution permits what the government did. Learning to read a constitutional opinion, find the load-bearing sentence, and check it against the actual text is the skill that lets you follow those arguments instead of taking someone else’s summary on faith.

Current Context

On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court held in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act does not authorize the President to impose tariffs, invalidating the fentanyl and reciprocal tariffs issued under it. Finding the holding takes work: Chief Justice Roberts announced the judgment, only parts of his opinion commanded a majority, and six justices wrote separately. The Court reasoned that the statute’s authority to regulate importation nowhere mentions tariffs or duties, and that the government could not name a single statute in which Congress had used that verb to authorize taxation. This is exactly the problem Part 4 sets for you. A summary will tell you the Court struck down the tariffs; only the opinion tells you which sentences six justices actually signed.

Key Concepts

Constitution

The supreme law that establishes the structure, limits, and authority of government in the United States. It is short by design, closer to a general outline than a detailed code, which is why so much constitutional meaning is worked out through Supreme Court interpretation.

Separation of Powers

The division of the federal government into legislative, executive, and judicial branches, each with its own function and its own checks on the others. Many of the hardest modern cases ask where one branch’s authority ends, especially as Congress delegates power to administrative agencies.

Federalism

The distribution of authority between the national government and the states. The Constitution grants the federal government enumerated powers and reserves the rest to the states, and the line between the two is contested in areas from commerce to public health.

Supremacy Clause

The provision in Article VI making the Constitution and valid federal law superior to conflicting state law. When a state rule collides with a constitutional federal one, the state rule yields.

Judicial Review

The power of courts to measure a law or government action against the Constitution and refuse to enforce it if it conflicts. The Supreme Court claimed this power for the judiciary in 1803, and it is the mechanism that makes the other limits enforceable rather than merely aspirational.

Fundamental Rights

Liberties either named in the Bill of Rights or deeply rooted in the nation’s history and tradition and essential to ordered liberty. Courts give these the strongest protection under the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses, and the question of what counts as fundamental drives some of the Court’s most divided decisions.

Case Brief

A short structured summary of a judicial opinion capturing its facts, the legal issue, the holding, and the Court’s reasoning. Briefing forces you to separate what the Court actually decided from the background and the rhetoric around it.

Holding

The specific legal rule the court establishes to resolve the dispute before it, as distinct from broader commentary that is not necessary to the decision. Identifying the holding precisely is what lets you predict how a case applies to the next situation.

Resources

The U.S. Constitution (full text) (The primary source itself; read the article or amendment your case interprets before you read anything written about it.)
Constitution Annotated (The Library of Congress’s clause-by-clause analysis of how the Supreme Court has interpreted each provision; use it to place a case within its doctrine.)
Oyez (Free case summaries, facts, holdings, and oral-argument audio for cases from 1955 forward, maintained by Chicago-Kent and Cornell LII; your starting point for the breadth scan.)
Google Scholar (A resource where you can pull the actual majority opinion to read and verify quotes against.)
Cornell Legal Information Institute, Supreme Court Collection (Full opinion text with linked cross-references, a reliable second source when you verify a quote across two databases.)
Marbury v. Madison, National Archives (The founding judicial-review decision with document images and historical context, useful as a worked example of how to read an old opinion.)

What to Do

This activity teaches a repeatable method for working through any constitutional case: scan broadly to build a map, brief a few cases closely, read one real opinion in full, and verify what you were told against the text. You will not master all of the cases below. You will leave with a process you can run on any case you meet for the rest of the course.

Part 1: Build the Map

Start wide. Choose at least ten cases from the list below, drawing two or three from each of the four functions so you see how the Constitution operates across different problems. For each one, use the Case Scanner prompt to generate a short summary, then read the matching Oyez page to confirm the AI got the facts and holding right. Your goal here is orientation, not depth: by the end you should be able to say, in a sentence each, what these cases are about and which constitutional function each one touches.

Judicial review and supremacy: Marbury v. Madison (1803), McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), United States v. Nixon (1974), West Virginia v. EPA (2022) Separation of powers and the administrative state: Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952), INS v. Chadha (1983), Seila Law LLC v. CFPB (2020), Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024), SEC v. Jarkesy (2024) Federalism and the Commerce Clause: Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), Wickard v. Filburn (1942), United States v. Lopez (1995), Printz v. United States (1997), NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), Murphy v. NCAA (2018) Individual rights: Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis (2023), Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), United States v. Rahimi (2024)

Part 2: Brief Four Cases

Now narrow. Pick one case from each of the four functions, four in total, choosing the ones that interested you most during the scan. Write a short brief for each using the structure in Key Concepts: facts, issue, holding, and reasoning. Use the Brief Builder prompt to draft each one, but treat the output as a first pass you will correct, not a finished product. As you go, name the constitutional function at work and, where it fits, identify which branch’s power or which right is in dispute and where in the Constitution that authority comes from. The Constitution Annotated is your tool for locating the governing clause.

Part 3: Read One Opinion in Full

From your four briefs, choose the case you found most compelling. Find the full majority opinion on Google Scholar or Cornell LII and read it. You will not understand every term, and that is fine. Read for the shape of the argument: how the Justice frames the question, what the Court relies on, and how it gets from the facts to the holding. Notice where the opinion’s own words differ from the tidy summary you read in Part 1.

Part 4: Verify the Load-Bearing Quote

Return to the case you just read. Use the Quote Locator prompt to get the single sentence the AI claims captures the heart of the opinion, along with the name of the Justice who wrote it. Then play detective. Open the full opinion, search for the quote with Ctrl+F or Cmd+F, and confirm it appears word for word. Read the full paragraph before and after it. Ask whether the surrounding text changes what the quote means, and check the AI’s claim about which Justice wrote it against the opinion’s caption. If the quote is misattributed, paraphrased, or pulled out of context in a way that distorts it, write down exactly what was wrong. This is the habit that separates lawyers who use AI well from those who get sanctioned for citing cases that say something other than what they were told.

Part 5: Write Your Reflection

In a post of 400 to 600 words, reflect on the method rather than summarizing the cases. Address what surprised you most when you moved from the AI summaries to the actual opinion text. Describe what happened during the verification step in Part 4: did checking the quote and reading its context change your understanding of the case, and can you give one specific example? Close by naming the constitutional function that now seems most complex or most important to you, and explain why.

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

Suggested AI Prompts

Use these prompts as a starting point, then adjust them to fit your goal. Strong prompting develops through trial, revision, and testing. It’s a foundational skill that grows into more advanced AI work such as context engineering and agent-based workflows.

Case Scanner

You are helping a college student in an Introduction to Law course build a quick mental map of constitutional cases. Ask me to name one U.S. Supreme Court case. Once I give it to you, write a tight summary of no more than 150 words covering the key facts, the constitutional question, the Court’s holding, and why the case matters. Then state in one sentence which of the Constitution’s core functions the case touches: structuring government through separation of powers or federalism, asserting the supremacy of federal law and the Constitution, or protecting individual rights. If the case turns on judicial review, say so. Keep the language plain and do not pad it.

This prompt uses role and context setting plus a hard length cap. Telling the model who the reader is and forcing a word limit keeps the breadth scan fast and comparable across ten cases, instead of producing ten essays of uneven depth.

Brief Builder

You are an experienced legal writing instructor. Ask me to name one U.S. Supreme Court constitutional case. After I respond, produce a case brief using exactly these four labeled sections: Facts, Issue, Holding, Reasoning. In the Holding section, state the precise legal rule the Court adopted and keep it separate from any broader commentary in the opinion. In a final line labeled “Constitutional function,” identify which function the case illustrates and, if relevant, which branch’s power or which individual right is at stake and where in the Constitution that authority is located. Write in full sentences within each section.

This prompt uses structured output by specifying named sections and the order they appear in. Forcing the model into a fixed brief format makes its answers easy to compare and, more importantly, exposes gaps, because a thin Reasoning section is a signal to go check the opinion yourself.

Quote Locator

You are helping me read a Supreme Court opinion closely. Ask me to name the case. Once I do, tell me which Justice wrote the majority opinion, then give me the single sentence from that opinion you believe best captures its core constitutional significance, quoted exactly as it appears in the decision. Below the quote, explain in two or three sentences why that sentence matters for constitutional structure, supremacy, or rights. Flag clearly if you are uncertain whether the wording or the authorship is exact, and tell me you may be wrong and that I should verify the quote against the full opinion before relying on it.

This prompt builds verification into the workflow by asking the model to surface its own uncertainty and to instruct you to check the source. Models invent and misattribute quotes confidently, so a prompt that names the failure mode and tells you to confirm against the opinion is doing the work that keeps a citation honest.

Doctrine Connector

You are a constitutional law tutor. I will give you two cases I have already briefed. Without re-summarizing them, explain how they relate to each other doctrinally: do they apply the same constitutional function, push in the same or opposite directions, or refine or limit one another over time? Then ask me one question that tests whether I can apply the rule from the more recent case to a new hypothetical. Wait for my answer before telling me whether I am right.

This prompt uses Socratic elicitation: it ends by making the model ask you a question and withhold the answer until you respond. Having the model test your reasoning rather than hand you a conclusion turns it into a study partner instead of an answer key, which is the difference between learning the doctrine and renting it.