Definition
"Constitutional con" does not appear to be an established legal term of art. The fragment surfaces in Bouvier's Law Dictionary as part of a longer phrase — almost certainly "constitutional construction" or "constitutional consideration" — where the text has been truncated. Based on the Bouvier context and standard legal usage, the most probable full term is CONSTITUTIONAL CONSTRUCTION, meaning the process by which courts, legislatures, and executives interpret constitutional text to determine its application to a specific question not resolved by the plain language of the document.
Constitutional construction is distinct from constitutional interpretation (see COMMON CONFUSION below). Construction fills the gaps that interpretation leaves open: where the meaning of constitutional text is genuinely indeterminate, construction supplies a working legal meaning drawn from structure, purpose, historical practice, and principle.
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Common Confusion
CONSTITUTIONAL CONSTRUCTION vs. CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATION: These terms are frequently used interchangeably in older sources, including Bouvier's, but modern constitutional theory treats them as distinct operations. Interpretation determines the linguistic meaning of constitutional text. Construction translates that meaning into enforceable legal doctrine when interpretation alone underdetermines the outcome. The distinction matters most when original meaning runs out — that is, when historical sources establish what a provision meant but do not resolve how it applies to a novel circumstance. Researchers reading nineteenth-century sources should not assume the author is making this modern distinction; Bouvier uses "construction" and "interpretation" without rigorous separation.
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Core Elements
The Bouvier fragment references two structural principles worth noting:
1. LEGISLATIVE PLENARY AUTHORITY: A state legislature has jurisdiction over all subjects on which its legislation is not constitutionally prohibited. This is the default rule of state legislative power — the residuum of sovereignty runs to the states, not the federal government. The inverse applies federally: Congress acts only within enumerated powers.
2. MORAL AND HONORABLE OBLIGATIONS AS CONSTITUTIONAL CONSIDERATION: The Bouvier passage gestures at whether congressional appropriations grounded in equity or moral obligation — rather than strict legal right — satisfy constitutional requirements. This is a narrow but recurring question in public claims law.
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Why It Matters in Research
The immediate practical problem: the source material for this entry is a truncated fragment. Researchers encountering "constitutional con—" in a Bouvier citation should treat it as an incomplete reference and locate the full passage in the original volume. Bouvier's Law Dictionary (particularly the 1914 Rawle revision) is the authoritative shelf source; the fragment here cuts off mid-sentence and mid-argument.
More broadly, constitutional construction is a live research area with significant corpus depth. Nineteenth-century treatise writers — Cooley especially — used "constitutional limitations" as a framework for discussing both what constitutions prohibit and what they permit by implication. The cite in the Bouvier fragment (Cooley, Const. Lim. 210) refers to Thomas M. Cooley's A Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations Which Rest Upon the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union, a foundational work that shaped Gilded Age constitutional law. Researchers working in state constitutional history will encounter Cooley repeatedly; his framework for legislative power under state constitutions is the doctrinal baseline against which early decisions are argued.
The state reports cited in the fragment — 24 N.Y. 427 and 52 Pa. 477 — are pre-codification New York and Pennsylvania decisions. Researchers should use official state report citations when verifying these; modern databases index them inconsistently under older citation formats.
The 148 U.S. 657 citation is a Supreme Court reporter volume from the 1890s. Researchers should verify the full case name and holding before relying on this cite, as Bouvier's cross-references occasionally contain transposition errors.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary treats constitutional construction as an extension of general rules of legal construction, applying the same tools — plain meaning, structure, intent, consequences — to constitutional rather than statutory text. The excerpt reflects Bouvier's characteristic method: lead with a broad structural principle (legislative plenary power subject to prohibition), then qualify it with case authority showing where the principle bends (congressional appropriations on equitable grounds). Bouvier does not sharply distinguish construction from interpretation; both collapse into the general question of what the document permits or requires.
What Bouvier does not address — and what researchers should not expect to find in nineteenth-century dictionaries — is the modern scholarly debate over construction versus interpretation as formally separate operations. That distinction is largely a product of late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century constitutional theory. Reading that framework backward into Bouvier will produce anachronistic results.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Constitutional Avoidance — The Doctrine of Avoiding Constitutional Questions (The Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia). Constitutional avoidance is a related doctrine: where a statute can be construed to avoid a constitutional question, courts prefer that construction. It sits at the intersection of constitutional construction and judicial restraint and is directly implicated whenever a court must decide how far to press constitutional interpretation.
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