How it’s built. Every rule, written down.

The five layers

The record is kept as five separate layers, drawn on the same years but never combined into a score:

• Amendments: all 27, dated by the day ratification was completed.
• Landmark cases: 77 Supreme Court decisions, dated by the year decided.
• Rights and powers: 48 laws, executive actions, investigations and impeachments, dated by when they began.
• Language: yearly print frequency for 24 terms in American English books.
• Executive orders: totals and yearly rates for every presidency.

The first three are curated lists written for Constilumen. The last two are downloaded datasets, refreshed by a script that records the source and the retrieval date in the data file itself.

How entries are chosen

Curated lists are where bias would enter, so the tests are fixed and apply to every era and every administration alike.

A case is included if it is widely taught as settling, changing or reversing a constitutional question: it appears in standard constitutional law casebooks and surveys, or a later decision or amendment expressly responded to it. How it was decided, or whom it favored, is not a factor.

An event is included if it changed, tested or measurably restricted a constitutional right or the separation of powers, and a primary or official source documents it. Expansions and restrictions are held to the same test.

The collection is selective by design. It is a guide to the landmarks, not a census, so counts drawn from it describe the collection, and pages say so wherever a count appears.

Cases

Each case records its citation in the United States Reports, the year decided, the vote as the Court reported the judgment, the question presented and the holding. Holdings are written to state what the Court decided in its own terms. Where a vote would mislead (a per curiam opinion, a split between judgment and reasoning, a recusal), a note says so.

Relationships are recorded only when the record is explicit: overruled when a later majority said so; superseded when an amendment changed the rule; repudiated when a later majority expressly rejected the reasoning without formally overruling it. Every case links to its full opinion.

Rights and powers

Events are classified by what they did, not by how they are now judged: restriction, expansion, oversight and accountability, emergency and war powers, surveillance, or founding. Summaries say who did what, and when it ended, if it did. They do not characterize motives.

Language

Frequencies come from the Google Books Ngram Viewer, corpus en-US (American English), case-insensitive, unsmoothed, 1789–2022, retrieved 2026-10-25. Values are stored as uses per million phrases of the same length. Charts apply a centered moving average (five years by default) and say so; the table view lists the averaged values by decade.

Constilumen does not score sentiment. Automated sentiment models are unreliable on historical text, and assigning a positive or negative score to a word like “nationalism” would be a judgment presented as data. A rise in frequency means more printing, by anyone, for any reason.

Executive orders

Counts are from The American Presidency Project, UC Santa Barbara, through October 20, 2026. Totals by presidential term. 1789–1945 counts include numbered and unnumbered orders; Washington through Coolidge figures come from Ragsdale, Vital Statistics on the Presidency (1998), as compiled by the Project. Rates are orders per year in office, as the source computes them. Executive orders are one form of presidential action among several, and a count says nothing about any order’s weight.

Eras

The thirteen eras follow common textbook divisions and do not overlap. They organize the record; they are not claims about when anything began or ended. Era summaries set the scene in a few sentences, and the pages list what the data holds for those years.

Limits

• The collection is curated, so it cannot answer “how often” questions about the Court or Congress as a whole.
• Print frequency covers digitized books only and ends in 2022.
• Some measures are not yet included, such as national emergencies under the National Emergencies Act. They will be added when a machine-readable primary source is available, not estimated.
• Summaries are orientation, not legal advice. The opinions, statutes and documents linked from each entry are the authority.

Corrections

If an entry is wrong, incomplete or unfairly worded, write to support@stacklumen.com with the entry and a source. Corrections are made in the open and recorded on the Changelog.