A Daily Reading Plan for the Constitution

The Constitution is shorter than most people expect. The text signed in 1787 runs to roughly 4,500 words, and with all twenty-seven amendments the whole document comes to about 7,600. You could read it straight through in an hour. Most people who try that finish with a vague impression and very little they can still recall a week later.

Small daily portions work better. Ten or fifteen minutes a day for about three weeks gives each section room to settle before the next one arrives. You begin to notice the seams: where the text is exact, where it is deliberately open, which powers are spelled out and which are left to inference. What follows is a plan you can follow as written or bend to whatever pace suits you.

What you need

Very little. An accurate copy of the text, and somewhere to write. Read from a primary source rather than a summary. The National Archives transcript gives you the plain text as written, and the Constitution Annotated from the Library of Congress sets each clause beside an account of how courts have read it. Our guide to the primary sources explains how the free editions differ and which one suits which purpose.

Keep a notebook. Reading the Constitution is largely an exercise in noticing, and what you notice will not survive the week unless you write it down. A cheap notebook and three lines a day is enough.

Week one: the original text

The first week covers the 1787 document. Article I is by far the longest part, taking up roughly half the original text on its own, so it gets four sittings while everything else gets one.

1. Day 1, the Preamble. One sentence of about fifty words, and perhaps five minutes of reading. Notice who is speaking, and count the six purposes it names.
2. Day 2, Article I, Sections 1 through 5. How Congress is built: two chambers, who is eligible for each, how members are chosen and counted, who judges elections and sets the rules. About ten minutes.
3. Day 3, Article I, Sections 6 and 7. Pay, privileges, and the mechanics of turning a bill into law, including the veto and the override. Short, and worth reading twice.
4. Day 4, Article I, Section 8. The list of powers granted to Congress, ending with the Necessary and Proper Clause. This one section carries more argument than any other passage of comparable length. Give it fifteen minutes.
5. Day 5, Article I, Sections 9 and 10. Two lists of prohibitions: first what Congress may not do, then what the states may not do. Read them as a pair and compare.
6. Day 6, Article II. The presidency: selection, qualifications, powers, removal. Notice how much shorter it is than Article I, and how much less it settles.
7. Day 7, Article III. The judiciary, and the shortest of the three branch articles. Notice what it does not say, including anything explicit about refusing to enforce a statute.

Week two: the rest of 1787, then the Bill of Rights

The second week finishes the original document and starts the amendments. From here the portions get shorter, which is the point. The amendments repay slow reading far more than fast reading.

1. Day 8, Articles IV, V, VI and VII. The states' dealings with one another, the amendment process, the Supremacy Clause and the oath, and the rule that put the document into effect. Roughly ten minutes for all four.
2. Day 9, the First Amendment. A single sentence of about forty-five words carrying six distinct guarantees. Try listing them from memory afterwards.
3. Day 10, the Second and Third Amendments. Both are short. Read each twice, once for what it grants and once for what it assumes.
4. Day 11, the Fourth Amendment. Two clauses joined by a comma. Work out where the first ends and the second begins.
5. Day 12, the Fifth Amendment. Five separate protections packed into one paragraph. Name them.
6. Day 13, the Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Amendments. The trial rights, read as a group.
7. Day 14, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. Two short rules about everything the document did not mention.

Our page on the Bill of Rights walks through these ten clause by clause in plain language, if you want a companion for the week.

Week three: the later amendments

Seventeen amendments were added after 1791, spread across two centuries. Read in order, they are the closest thing the document has to a narrative.

1. Day 15, the Eleventh and Twelfth. Both were written to fix problems the original text produced once it was in use.
2. Day 16, the Thirteenth. Two sentences, and the first amendment to change who the Constitution's protections are for.
3. Day 17, the Fourteenth. The longest amendment and the most heavily litigated. It deserves a day to itself.
4. Day 18, the Fifteenth. Then reread the Thirteenth and Fourteenth beside it and consider the three as one project.
5. Day 19, the Sixteenth through Nineteenth. The income tax, direct election of senators, Prohibition, and women's suffrage.
6. Day 20, the Twentieth through Twenty-Second. Including the Twenty-First, the only amendment that repeals another.
7. Day 21, the Twenty-Third through Twenty-Seventh. Ending on an amendment proposed in 1789 and not ratified until 1992.

A full list with dates and one-line summaries sits on our amendments page.

Keeping a reading notebook

Three lines a day is plenty. The habit matters more than the volume, and a short entry you actually write beats a long one you plan and skip.

• One sentence in your own words. Not a summary of the whole passage. Just the single thing today's portion does.
• One thing you did not understand. Leave it unresolved and move on. Several of these will answer each other by the end of the third week.
• One word to look up. The text uses ordinary English in some places and terms of art in others, and the difference is not always signposted. Our glossary covers the terms that come up most.

The second time through

The first pass tells you what is in the document. A second pass is more useful if you bring one question to it and follow that question only, letting everything else go by. Pick one and read the whole text again in a week of longer sittings.

• Who decides? Track every place the text names a person or body and gives it the final word.
• Where are the numbers? Ages, terms, fractions, majorities. The document is unusually specific about counting and unusually vague about much else.
• Where does it say by law? Those are the places the framers handed the details to a later Congress.
• What is left to the states? Read Articles I and IV with the Tenth Amendment open beside them.

The clause-by-clause browse view of the Constitution Annotated is well suited to this kind of reading, because it lets you jump directly to a clause rather than scrolling through an article to find it.

If you fall behind

Missing days is normal and costs you nothing. Pick up where you left off rather than doubling a portion to catch up, because the doubled sitting is the one people quit on. Three weeks of reading spread over five weeks is still three weeks of reading.

Some readers prefer a weekly rhythm, taking one portion a week over five months. That works too, as long as you keep the notebook. The plan is a scaffold, not a rule.