US Constitution, Article III: the courts

Article III builds the whole judicial branch in a few lines. It creates one Supreme Court and lets Congress add lower courts, which it did with the Judiciary Act of 1789. Judges hold their seats during good behavior, and their pay cannot be lowered while they serve. The first Supreme Court had six members, not the nine sitting there today.

Where this text comes fromThis passage builds an entire branch of government in two sentences. What it does not say is as interesting as what it does: it names one Supreme Court and leaves everything below it to Congress, which is why the number of justices has never been fixed by the Constitution. The first court had six members. The fragment ends with the sentence that protects a judge’s pay, and the heading of the next section follows immediately in the document. The edition linked below is the House of Representatives text, keeping the original spelling of Behaviour.

What you might not noticeThe document writes supreme in lower case both times the word appears, while Court and Courts each take a capital. The name everyone now uses as one title is assembled here from a small adjective and a large noun, and the fragment shows the two words side by side in its opening line. Source

What it trainsNine commas across 405 characters, and most of them arrive in the second sentence, which suspends its own subject twice before reaching the verb. That construction is the exercise: you have to keep typing a clause whose ending you cannot yet see. Seventeen capitals, fifteen of them mid-sentence, follow the 1787 habit of capitalizing the nouns that matter: Power, Court, Judges, Offices, Services, Compensation, Continuance. The longest word is Compensation at twelve letters. British spelling appears once, in Behaviour, and it is the word most people retype after looking back.

Read the full text at the publisher: U.S. National Archives