A few years ago, I had what I thought was a simple question: how many times has Virginia’s constitution been amended since its 1971 revision?

The Virginia state government’s wonderful Legislative Information System (LIS), which maintains official copies of legislation and the Constitution, was unfortunately of little help. As with most constitutions, Virginia amendments directly edit the existing text; so the LIS only offers the most current version of Virginia’s constitution, not a history of changes. Changes are noted in footnotes, which can be helpful — unless you are looking for a comprehensive list of those changes.

Similarly, the widely used, online legal resource Justia offers only the latest version as well. My other go-to source on state politics, Ballotpedia’s self-described “encyclopedia of American politics,” was also surprisingly unhelpful. The relevant Ballotpedia page only noted that “the Virginia constitution has been amended 14 times since 2006,” which might be true, but does not provide the full picture.

In fact, there seemed to be only three sources of information about Virginia’s constitutional amendments. The first was a PDF copy of the Constitution of Virginia, issued by the Clerk’s Office of Virginia’s lower House of Delegates. This document includes a series of footnotes that catalogs the number of times the Constitution has been amended, but that is also unclear about the specific number of amendments. Moreover, the document was extremely difficult to find, buried in a long list of General Assembly publications and is not even featured on the “Constitution” page of the General Assembly website. The second source was the Library of Virginia’s transcription of the 1971 Constitution, also posted as a PDF document and which contains some inserted text about amendments.

The last source is the Council of State Government’s excellent Book of the States, my main resource for state-by-state data. However, as I found through research, the BOS actually had the wrong number! It is hard to blame the authors and researchers; they were probably having just as much trouble as I was finding information.

And so I came to this startling conclusion: There was no publicly available, easily accessible list of amendments to the Constitution of Virginia. Moreover, sources that would normally provide even the number of amendments were incomplete or inaccurate.

This lack of available information suggested an urgent need for public information about the Constitution of Virginia. The dearth affects scholars of law and political science who wish to study our state constitution, K12 or higher ed teachers who are engaging students in Virginia history and civic education, and any Virginia citizen who wishes to learn about the Commonwealth’s constitutional tradition.

The Virginia Amendments Project at Randolph-Macon College addresses this immediate need for a public resource detailing amendments to the Constitution of Virginia. In addition, I hope that the Project will provide an ongoing hub for conversation, scholarship, and public awareness of the importance of the state constitution for citizens of Virginia.

— Rich Meagher, December 2022