Coleman v. Miller

Coleman v. Miller
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued October 10, 1938 Reargued April 17–April 18, 1939 Decided June 5, 1939
Full case name	Coleman, et al. v. Miller, Secretary of the Senate of State of Kansas, et al.
Citations	307 U.S. 433 (more) 59 S. Ct. 972; 83 L. Ed. 1385; 1939 U.S. LEXIS 1066; 1 Lab. Cas. (CCH) P17,046; 122 A.L.R. 695
Prior history	Cert. to the Supreme Court of Kansas
Holding
A proposed amendment to the Federal Constitution is considered pending before the states indefinitely unless Congress establishes a deadline by which the states must act. Further, Congress—not the courts—is responsible for deciding whether an amendment has been validly ratified.
Court membership
Case opinions
Majority	Hughes, joined by Roberts, Black, Reed, Frankfurter, Douglas
Concurrence	Black, joined by Roberts, Frankfurter, Douglas
Dissent	Butler, joined by McReynolds
Laws applied
U.S. Const. Art. V

Coleman v. Miller, 307 U.S. 433 (1939) is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court which clarified that if the Congress of the United States—when proposing for ratification an amendment to the United States Constitution, pursuant to Article V thereof—chooses not to set a deadline by which the state legislatures of three-fourths of the states or, if prescribed by Congress State ratifying conventions in three-fourths of the states, must act upon the proposed amendment, then the proposed amendment remains pending business before the state legislatures (or conventions). The case centered on the Child Labor Amendment, which was proposed for ratification by Congress in 1924.

The practice of limiting the time available to the states to ratify proposed amendments began in 1917 with the Eighteenth Amendment. All amendments proposed since then, with the exception of the Nineteenth Amendment and the Child Labor Amendment, have included a deadline, either in the body of the proposed amendment, or in the joint resolution transmitting it to the states. In its decision the Court concluded that Congress was quite aware in 1924 that—had it desired to do so—it could have imposed a deadline upon the Child Labor Amendment and Congress simply chose not to.

According to Coleman, it is none other than the Congress itself—if and when the Congress should later be presented with valid ratifications from the required number of states—which has the discretion to arbitrate the question of whether too much time has elapsed between Congress' initial proposal of that amendment and the most recent state ratification thereof assuming that, as a consequence of that most recent ratification, the legislatures of (or conventions conducted within) at least three-fourths of the states have ratified that amendment at one time or another.