Constitution of the March of Arizona

The Constitution of the March of Arizona, universally called the March Charter, is the instrument of government of the United Kingdom of America’s only remaining March, the other, the Northern March, having become the State of the Dakotas in 1889. It was negotiated at Phoenix and sealed in 1884, when Parliament created the March, and it has never been replaced.

The two names are the same document. Constitution of the March of Arizona is its formal style and the name under which it is cited in the Realm’s courts; the March Charter is what Arizonans call it, what the March Diet calls it in ordinary business, and what appears on the sealed engrossment. Nothing turns on the distinction and the Register uses both.

It is unusual among the Realm’s polity instruments in three respects. It was sealed rather than voted, being a negotiated covenant between three parties rather than an enactment of a convention. Those parties included the Indigenous nations of the March, which signed it, and which no other polity’s founding instrument records as a party. And it treats as constitutional two subjects that other polities regulate by statute: water, which it removes from commerce entirely, and heat, which it did not mention in 1884 and now governs at greater length than it governs the Diet.

It is also the most heavily amended instrument in the Realm, with one hundred and thirty-five amendments in a hundred and forty-four years, and the ease of amending it is the reason it has survived without replacement. The largest of those amendments, in 1953, abolished the second chamber the instrument had created in 1884 and put in its place the concurrent regional majority that now governs the Diet’s most important business.

Status

The requirement

Every polity of the Union is required to have a constitution. The obligation is federal, statutory and comparatively recent, and it does not come from the Charter of Union.

It comes from the Polity Instruments Act 1889, which required every polity of the Realm to reduce its government to a single written instrument, to deposit an authenticated copy with the Clerk of the Parliaments, and to deposit every subsequent amendment. The Act was passed five years after federal direct rule over the rebel polities ended in 1884, and the connection was not accidental: a Parliament that had withdrawn from the internal government of five polities wanted to know, in writing and in one place, what it had withdrawn into.

The Act created no uniformity and was not intended to. It prescribes that a polity shall have an instrument, that the instrument shall provide for a legislature, an executive answerable to it and a judiciary, and that it shall not be inconsistent with the Charter or with federal law. It says nothing about what else the instrument may contain, which is why the Realm’s polity constitutions range from Vermont’s, which is short and eighteenth-century, to the March’s, which runs to eleven chapters and is longer than the Charter of Union.

The Act’s effect on the older polities was awkward and is the reason several of them have instruments that read oddly. Arizona did not have this problem, its instrument having been sealed five years before the Act and having been drafted, as it happens, by people who knew the Act was coming.

The Act’s passage is treated in the Realm’s constitutional writing as one of the quieter consequences of the war settlement, and it is worth setting out because the March’s position within it is unusual. Parliament in 1884 had withdrawn from polities it had governed directly for nearly two decades, and the withdrawal exposed a question nobody had needed to answer before: what exactly had it withdrawn into? Four of the five rebel polities had governed under instruments suspended in 1866 and never formally revived, one had adopted a new instrument under direct rule which its own population regarded as imposed, and the loyal polities’ arrangements ranged from a written constitution to a set of statutes and a body of custom nobody had ever collected.

The Act’s answer was procedural and deliberately unambitious. It required a document and prescribed almost nothing about its contents, on the reasoning that a Parliament which specified what a polity’s constitution must say would be governing the polity, which was the thing it was in the act of ceasing to do. The three requirements it did impose, a legislature, an executive answerable to it and a judiciary, are the minimum content of responsible government and were included because two of the rebel polities’ pre-war instruments had not clearly provided for the second.

Compliance took nineteen years. The last polity deposited in 1908, having spent most of two decades arguing about what its constitution actually consisted of, which is the episode the Realm’s constitutional lawyers cite when they wish to make the point that an unwritten constitution is not a constitution that has been written somewhere else.

Citation

The instrument is cited by Chapter and Article, so that Chapter VIII, Article 3 is the ordinary form in an Arizona court and Chapter VI is how the Diet refers to the water provisions. Amendments are cited by number and year.

Chapters are numbered in Roman figures and Articles in Arabic, an arrangement copied from the Charter of Union and retained through every amendment.

History

The creation of the March, 1884

Parliament created the March of Arizona in 1884, judging that ordinary polity government was insufficient for a region in which water, heat, land, border movement, Indigenous sovereignty, military land, mining and desert settlement were permanently federal in their consequences and permanently local in their administration.

The March form was chosen deliberately and against alternatives. A Province would have implied the ancient colonial model, which the region had no history of. A State would have implied ordinary government, which was the thing Parliament had just decided was insufficient. The March is a frontier form, carrying the constitutional implication that the polity requires special arrangements and that the Crown retains a direct interest in its government, and the office of Lord Marcher is what that interest looks like in practice.

The negotiation

The instrument was negotiated at Phoenix across the winter and spring of 1884 and was sealed rather than voted, which is the most consequential procedural fact about it.

A convention would have produced an instrument enacted by whoever attended, and whoever attended would have been the settler population, because the territorial franchise reached nobody else. A sealed covenant produced an instrument to which three parties were signatories, and the Realm’s constitutional writing treats the choice as the reason the March’s arrangements have held: an instrument the nations signed is an instrument the nations can be held to and can hold others to, and an instrument enacted over their heads would have been neither.

The negotiation was not friendly and the record is not flattering. The Crown’s commissioners arrived with a draft, the settler delegates rewrote most of it, and the nations’ representatives were admitted to the negotiation late, after the water chapter was substantially settled and before the chapter concerning them was drafted at all.

The sequence matters and the March acknowledges it. Chapter VI was settled first because the settler delegates cared about it most and because the commissioners had instructions about it; the nations arrived to a water chapter they had not negotiated and a chapter about themselves that did not yet exist. What they were able to obtain in Chapter VI was Article 5, the requirement that an allocation state its effect on treaty water, which they secured late and which has proved worth more than anything they obtained in Chapter VII.

The negotiation ran from January to May of 1884 in a building that no longer stands, and the record of it is unusually complete because the Crown’s commissioners kept a full minute and because two of the settler delegates kept private journals which their families deposited in the 1930s. The three accounts disagree about tone and agree about substance, and the March’s historical commission published a consolidated edition in 1984 which is the standard source.

The three parties

The instrument was sealed by the Crown, by the delegates of the settled population of the Territory, and by the Indigenous nations of the March, and all three seals are on the engrossment at Phoenix.

The nations’ signature is the fact that distinguishes the March Charter from every other polity instrument in the Realm. No other founding document records an Indigenous nation as a party rather than as a subject, and the Realm’s constitutional literature has spent a century arguing about what follows from it. The March’s own courts have held that it follows that the instrument is a covenant and not a grant, that the nations’ rights under it are contractual as well as statutory, and that a provision affecting them cannot be construed as though they had not been at the table.

The nations’ bargain

What the nations obtained for their signature was a consultative body and the water clauses, and they knew it.

The Council of Nations and Compacts as established in 1884 could be consulted, could tender advice, could require that its advice be received, and could not require that it be followed. The nations’ representatives understood this perfectly. The negotiation record shows them saying so, at length and repeatedly, and it shows the Crown’s commissioners declining to offer more.

They signed because the alternative on offer was no instrument at all. A March constituted without them would have been a March in which their standing rested on federal treaty alone, exercised at a distance by a government that had spent the preceding forty years conducting removals, and in which no Arizona institution would have been obliged even to hear them. They took a body that could speak and could not decide, in exchange for being parties to the covenant rather than subjects of it, and the century that followed is the argument about whether that was a bad bargain or the only one available.

The Register’s view, which is the view of the March’s own historians, is that both propositions are true and that the second does not excuse the first.

The water chapter

Chapter VI was drafted first and is the reason the instrument commands the assent it does.

The Salt River works had not yet been built in 1884, and the drafters were not legislating for Phoenix as it became. They were legislating against something they had watched happen elsewhere in the west: the acquisition of the water on which a whole region depended by companies which then sold it back. The chapter’s governing proposition, that water is constitutional and not commercial, was written by men who had seen the alternative and who believed, correctly, that a desert polity whose water was privately owned would be governed by whoever owned it.

Heat

The instrument of 1884 says nothing whatever about heat.

This is not an oversight and the article says so plainly. The March of 1884 had a settler population in the tens of thousands, most of it engaged in mining, ranching and irrigation agriculture, and the heat was a condition of life rather than a subject of government. What made heat constitutional was mechanical cooling, which made the desert habitable at metropolitan scale, and then made the population dependent on a system that fails.

The heat provisions were added across sixty years, one at a time, each after a particular failure, and Chapter IX now runs longer than Chapter IV, which establishes the Diet.

Amendment as a habit

The instrument has been amended one hundred and thirty-five times, which is more than any other polity instrument in the Realm and more than the Charter of Union has been amended in twice the time.

Arizona regards this as a virtue and the Register agrees with it. An instrument for a place that changes this fast has to be able to change, and the March in 1884 was a mining and ranching territory of a few tens of thousands, and the March holds a metropolitan region of several million in a desert that is measurably hotter than it was. An instrument that could not be amended would have been abandoned, and the March would be on its third or fourth constitution, as several of the Realm’s polities are.

The cost is that the instrument is long, uneven and in places redundant, and that ordinary policy is sometimes entrenched in it by whoever holds the Diet at the time.

The amendments cluster in a way that maps the March’s history precisely. Eleven were made in the founding decade, most of them technical. Twenty-two were made between 1900 and 1930, chiefly concerning mining, labour and the basin authorities. Nineteen were made in the 1950s and 1960s, the March’s period of fastest growth, and they include the abolition of the Chamber of Regions in 1953 and the amendments that built the modern water administration. Thirty-one were made between 1969 and 1996, which is the Chapter IX period and the March’s constitutional high-water mark. The rate has slowed since, and only nine amendments have been made since 2010, which the March’s commentators read as a sign that the instrument has caught up with its conditions and its critics read as a sign that the Diet has stopped trying.

Because amendment requires a concurrent majority under Chapter V, Article 4, an amendment needs four of six regions, and the practical constraint on the process is not difficulty but coalition. An amendment that serves the Valley alone does not pass, and an amendment that serves the Valley and three other regions passes easily, which has produced an instrument shaped by the interests that could find allies rather than by the interests that were strongest.

The abolition of the Chamber of Regions

The amendment of 1953 is the largest single change ever made to the instrument, and it is the one that gives the March its present constitutional shape.

The Chamber of Regions had worked for two generations and had stopped working. Its trouble was arithmetic. Four members from each of six regions was defensible in 1884, when the Valley held perhaps a fifth of the March’s people, and was indefensible by 1950, when it held rather more than a third and was growing faster than everywhere else combined. A Valley voter’s share of the upper chamber had fallen to a fraction of a Highlands voter’s, and the Chamber had acquired the habit that malapportioned upper chambers acquire, which is to defend the arrangement that produced it.

It also had an absolute veto on everything, and it used it. The post-war decade produced a series of deadlocks over water works, road building, school finance and the Valley’s boundaries, in which measures carried in the Diet by large majorities were rejected in the Chamber by twelve votes to twelve or thereabouts, and the March’s government slowed to the pace of whatever three regions were most annoyed. The Chamber’s defenders argued, correctly, that this was what it was for. Its opponents argued, also correctly, that a body which can stop everything and start nothing is not a check but an obstacle.

What broke the deadlock was that both sides wanted the same thing for different reasons. The Valley wanted the Chamber gone. The five other regions wanted their protection kept. The settlement of 1953 gave each of them what it actually needed and neither what it had asked for: the Chamber was abolished outright, and its protective function was moved inside the single chamber as the concurrent majority of Chapter V.

The trade is precise and the March’s constitutional writers set it out in the same terms every time. The regions lost an absolute veto exercisable by any four of twenty-four members over any measure whatever. They gained a requirement that six named classes of measure obtain majorities in four of six regions, which is a weaker protection over a narrower field and cannot be exercised by a handful of members against a settled majority. The Valley lost nothing it had ever possessed and gained the ability to legislate on everything outside the six classes by ordinary majority, which is most of what a government does.

Whether the regions were sold something worth less than what they gave up is the March’s oldest live constitutional argument after the nations’ standing, and it is argued most sharply in the Highlands and the Basin, whose small populations were the largest beneficiaries of equal regional representation and are the smallest beneficiaries of a four-of-six rule.

The amendment passed with the assent of every region, which its critics attribute to the Diet having attached the water publication provisions to it, and it is the reason Chapter V is drafted with such unusual precision: the parties to the 1953 settlement had all just watched what happens when a constitutional protection is capable of more than one reading.

The Spanish text

The instrument was sealed in English only, which the Eastern March has never regarded as satisfactory and which was a straightforward consequence of who was in the room.

Spanish was made equally authentic by the amendment of 1948, after two decades of pressure from New Mexico and the border districts. The 1948 amendment is unusual in that it did not translate the instrument but re-enacted it in both languages, so that the Spanish text is authentic from 1948 and is not a translation of anything. Where the two texts differ, and they differ in eleven places, the March’s Supreme Court applies the construction that better serves the provision’s purpose and has declined, four times, to hold that either language prevails.

The nations’ languages are not authentic. The instrument is published in Diné bizaad and in the principal Pueblo languages, and those texts are official and are not authoritative, which the nations have raised at every constitutional review since 1974.

The amendment of 1974

The American Rights Act’s extension to the polities in 1962 created a problem the March could not ignore.

Section 43 of that Act imposes on every public authority a duty to consult an Indigenous nation before taking a decision which may adversely affect a treaty right, in good faith, at a stage at which the decision can still be altered, and with the intention of accommodating the interest so far as is reasonable. Section 7.2 provides that no enactment of a polity may secure less than the Act provides. The March’s own founding instrument secured conspicuously less, its Council being consultative in the weak sense the 1884 negotiation had settled on.

The March amended rather than waited to be sued. The amendment of 1974 rewrote Chapter VII to import the federal standard in terms, so that the Council’s consultation now carries the duty section 43 imposes: it must occur before the decision is fixed, must be conducted in good faith, and must be answered. It did not give the Council a veto, which the nations had asked for and which the Diet would not pass.

The nations’ position since 1974 has been that the March adopted the federal minimum and called it a settlement, and that a polity whose founding instrument records them as a signing party ought to secure more than a polity where they are merely residents.

The Diet’s position, stated in the debate on the 1974 amendment and not materially varied since, has three limbs. The first is that a veto over March measures would give the Council a power no other body in the March possesses, including the Lord Marcher, whose emergency authority is subject to confirmation and to time limits. The second is that the nations already hold a veto in the one place it matters most, Chapter VIII, Article 6, over the use of emergency authority within their territory. The third is that the March’s courts construe every ambiguity in the nations’ favour by reason of Chapter I, Article 3, which is a general advantage no consultative body elsewhere enjoys.

The nations’ answer to all three is the same: that a benefit of construction is not a power of decision, that a veto confined to emergencies is a veto over the rarest class of measure and not over the ordinary business that actually affects them, and that a body which signed the instrument is entitled to be something other than the best-treated of the March’s consultees.

The text

The instrument is reproduced below as sealed in 1884, Chapter by Chapter, from the engrossment at Phoenix. Editorial commentary follows each Chapter, records what has since been amended, and is not part of the instrument.

The Register reproduces the sealed text rather than the text as it now stands, for the same reason it reproduces the enrolled Charter of Union of 1783: an instrument amended a hundred and thirty-five times is best understood by seeing what it said and then what was done to it. Where a Chapter now differs materially, the commentary says so and gives the modern provision. One Chapter, the ninth, did not exist in 1884 at all, and is given in its present form because there is no sealed text of it to give.

Chapter I: The March

Article 3 is the sentence that does the constitutional work, and it was in the instrument as sealed. A covenant is construed against neither party and a grant is construed against the grantee, and the March’s courts have relied on Article 3 in every significant case concerning the nations, most recently to hold that an ambiguity in Chapter VII must be resolved in the nations’ favour because they were at the table when it was written.

Three provisions have since been added. Article 2 now also names the instrument as the one required by the Polity Instruments Act 1889, five years after the sealing. Article 4 now adds that the instrument secures to persons within the March no less than the law of the Realm secures, inserted in 1963 to acknowledge what the American Rights Act’s extension had done. And Articles 6 and 7 were added in 1948 and 1974, providing that the English and Spanish texts are equally authentic and that the instrument shall be published in the languages of the nations, those publications being official and not authentic.

Chapter II: The Lord Marcher

Chapter II was short in 1884 and is short now, because the office is bounded and Article 6 is the boundary: the Lord Marcher holds the emergency authority and no other power to govern, which distinguishes the office from other polities’ Crown representatives chiefly by subtraction.

Two provisions have changed and both are consequences of episodes recorded below. Article 1 now requires consultation with the High Steward and with the Council of Nations and Compacts before appointment, added in 1974. Article 2 now fixes the term at eight years, non-renewable, substituted in 1911 for service at pleasure, after the crisis of 1903 established that a holder who might be reappointed serves whoever might reappoint them.

Article 7 has been enlarged twice. It now requires an annual report to the Diet and to the Parliament of the Realm, and requires the Lord Marcher to report not only every exercise of the authority but every occasion on which its exercise was considered and declined, which was enacted in 1996 from a practice Goldwater had adopted voluntarily and which produces the most-read document the office generates.

Chapter III: The High Steward and the Ministry

Chapter III is the least amended Chapter in the instrument and stands substantially as sealed.

Responsibility runs to the Diet alone and never ran to the Chamber of Regions, which is the most important thing about the Chapter and was contested in 1884. The Chamber could reject a measure and could not remove a Ministry, and the drafters were explicit that a government answerable to two chambers is a government answerable to neither.

Article 4 is the provision that keeps the Lord Marcher out of politics, and it is drafted as a description of two deadlocks rather than as a discretion: the power exists to break a paralysis and not to resolve a disagreement. It has been exercised twice, in 1907 and 1962, both times where a Diet had withdrawn confidence and a High Steward had done nothing. The first dismissal was made by the Territorial Governor, Joseph Kibbey, exercising the vacant office, and the High Steward he dismissed was George W. P. Hunt, who had lost a vote of confidence over a mining bill and declined either to resign or to advise a dissolution. The election that followed returned Hunt with a majority, Kibbey recommissioned him, and Hunt is the only High Steward to have been dismissed and recommissioned by the same hand.

Chapter IV: The legislature

Chapter IV is the Chapter that has changed most, and its Articles 1 to 4 as sealed are the reason the March’s modern constitution takes the shape it does.

The 1884 arrangement was the settled American answer to a polity of unequal regions: a lower chamber by population, an upper chamber by region, each holding a veto on the other. The Chamber of Regions had twenty-four members, four from each of the six regions whatever their populations, and its assent was required for everything. The Diet was renewed every second year, which is what a lower chamber checked by an upper chamber can afford to be.

The amendment of 1953 abolished the Chamber of Regions, made the Diet the sole legislature, extended its term to four years, and moved the regions’ protection inside the single chamber as the concurrent majority now found at Chapter V, Article 4. The abolition is described at length above and is the largest single change ever made to the instrument.

Two later amendments complete the modern Chapter. Article 2 was rewritten in 1968 to require a mixed-member proportional system corrected within each region rather than across the March, the machinery being left to ordinary legislation. And Article 7 was amended in 1938 to require a hundred sitting days rather than sixty and to require that not fewer than ten of them be held outside the Valley region, which the March’s constitutional writers regard as the cheapest useful thing the instrument does.

Chapter V: The regions

Chapter V as sealed does the work of describing the regions and nothing else, because in 1884 the regions did not need protecting inside a chamber: they had a chamber of their own.

The regions are constitutional entities and their boundaries are in the instrument, which distinguishes them from the electoral districts within them. The Valley is the Salt River metropolitan region; the Southern Desert is Tucson and the old borderlands; the Eastern March is the New Mexico country from Santa Fe and Albuquerque to Las Cruces; the Basin is the Las Vegas country west of the Colorado; the Border is El Paso and the southern crossing districts; and the Highlands are the Durango country and the St. George projection, which have almost nothing in common except elevation and were put together because six regions were wanted and seven would not have balanced. The Highlands’ composite character is the instrument’s least defensible piece of drafting and is defended on the ground that a region assembled for arithmetic has behaved for a century as a region.

The Chapter’s modern Article 4 is the concurrent majority, substituted in 1953 when the Chamber of Regions was abolished, and it is the provision on which the March’s modern politics turn.

Four of six regions is the threshold, which means the Valley cannot carry such a measure alone and cannot be blocked by one aggrieved region either. Three regions acting together can stop anything in the list, and the March’s politics have organised themselves around the arithmetic of finding a fourth.

A further Article, added at the same time, provides that the Speaker shall certify whether a measure is of a class named in Article 4 and that the certificate may be questioned in the Supreme Court of Arizona. The certificate has been litigated eleven times, producing the substance rule of the housing certificate of 1991: a measure is a water measure where its necessary and foreseeable effect is to alter the allocation of water between basins, whatever its subject-matter, and the Speaker’s characterisation is not conclusive.

Chapter VI: Water

Chapter VI is the oldest substantial Chapter and stands almost as sealed, which is unusual in an instrument amended this often and is the reason the March quotes it at people.

Article 1 is the founding proposition and it does its work by a definition rather than a prohibition: water is not the subject of ownership, so there is nothing to buy. Article 2 follows necessarily. The Realm’s water lawyers regard the pair as the cleanest statement of the trust doctrine anywhere in the Realm.

Article 3 has been tested twice. In 1923 a syndicate acquired what it believed to be title to a canal system and was held to have acquired nothing, the transfer being void from the beginning and no compensation arising because no property had passed. In 1988 a municipality attempted to lease its treatment works for thirty years, and the Supreme Court of Arizona held that a lease exceeding five years is a transfer whatever it is called.

Article 5 is the nations’ clause and is the most useful thing they obtained in 1884. They secured it late, after arriving to a water chapter they had not negotiated, and it has proved worth more than anything they obtained in Chapter VII. An authority that must state the effect on treaty water must first find out what the effect is, and most of what the March knows about its own groundwater exists because somebody had to write an Article 5 statement. The nations have voided allocations under Article 6 eleven times since 1974.

Two changes have been made. Article 3 was extended in 1961 to include treatment and distribution systems, which had not existed in 1884. And Article 7’s interbasin transfer provision was rewritten in 1953, the Chamber of Regions having been abolished, to require the concurrent majority of Chapter V instead. Article 8, requiring annual publication of the water available, allocated, taken and held in storage and in the ground, was added in 1996, and is the reason the aquifer’s decline is a political fact rather than a technical one.

Chapter VII: The nations

Chapter VII is the Chapter with the history, and reading it as sealed is the point of reproducing the 1884 text at all.

Article 1 is remarkable and Article 3 is not. The nations are parties to the instrument, which no other polity’s founding document says of them, and what the Chapter gives them is a body which may be consulted, which may tender its advice, and whose advice shall be received and entered upon the record. An authority was obliged to receive advice it had chosen to seek and was obliged to do nothing else with it, and for ninety years that was the whole of the Council’s standing.

Article 4 is the provision the March deleted. The nations are under the protection of the March: a sentence which in 1884 was intended as a guarantee and which reads now as the opposite of what it says, and which was removed in 1974 at the nations’ request and without argument. It is the only provision the March has ever deleted rather than amended.

Articles 3 to 5 were substituted in 1974, and the cause was federal law rather than Arizona’s conscience. The American Rights Act’s extension to the polities in 1962 imposed at section 43 a duty to consult in good faith, at a stage at which the decision may still be altered, with the intention of accommodating; and at section 7.2 provided that no polity enactment may secure less than the Act. Chapter VII plainly secured less. The March amended rather than wait to be sued, importing the federal standard in terms and adding one requirement the federal Act does not contain, that the authority answer any objection in writing and publish the answer with the decision.

The nations did not get the veto and asked for it. Their position since, stated at every constitutional review, is that the March adopted the federal minimum and called it a settlement.

Chapter VIII: Emergency

Chapter VIII is the reason Arizona is a March, and it was drawn narrowly in 1884 and has been drawn more narrowly since.

Article 1 is a closed list of conditions, not a general public-danger formula, and it is unaltered since the sealing. The conditions are the March’s own, and the second limb makes the authority residual: the ordinary powers of the Ministry must be insufficient.

Article 2 is the delicate provision and is also unaltered. The Lord Marcher acts on advice except where the Ministry cannot or will not give it, which is the situation the office exists for and is the situation in which a Crown representative is at greatest risk of appearing to govern. The requirement to declare that they are acting without advice makes the departure a public act.

Three changes have been made and all three narrow the power. Article 5 was substituted in 1971 by a list of things the authority is not: it does not authorise the Lord Marcher to legislate, to levy a charge, to alter the instrument, to dissolve the Diet, or to govern beyond the duration and purpose of the proclamation. The March’s law officers had advised that the 1884 formula was too imprecise to enforce. A new Article was added in 1963 providing that no authority under the Chapter extends to anything the American Rights Act declares to admit of no derogation. And a further Article was added in 1971 providing that no authority under the Chapter shall be exercised within the territory of a nation, or so as to affect a treaty right, without that nation’s consent, which is the only general veto the nations hold over anything in the March’s instrument.

Article 4’s clock now reads fourteen days without the Diet, ninety with an ordinary resolution, and beyond ninety only by the concurrent majority, which means a prolonged emergency requires four of six regions to agree that it is one.

The Chapter repays comparison with Part VII of the American Rights Act, substituted in 2008 after the May Day bombings, and the influence runs from Arizona to New Westminster rather than the other way: the stated condition, the fixed period, the automatic expiry, the confirmation requirement and the reporting duty were all here long before 2008, and the drafters of the Consolidation Act said in evidence that they had studied the March’s provisions. The one thing they did not take is the nations’ veto.

Chapter IX: The Declaration of Desert Rights

There is no sealed text of this Chapter. The instrument of 1884 says nothing whatever about heat.

This is not an oversight. The March of 1884 had a settler population in the tens of thousands engaged in mining, ranching and irrigation agriculture, and the heat was a condition of life rather than a subject of government. What made heat constitutional was mechanical cooling, which made the desert habitable at metropolitan scale and then made the population dependent on a system that fails.

The Chapter was built one Article at a time across sixty years, each after a particular failure, and it now runs longer than the Chapter establishing the legislature.

Each Article followed a failure. Article 1 followed the disconnection of a Phoenix district’s water in the summer of 1956 and the deaths that followed. Article 2 followed a series of deaths at unshaded transit stops and worksites. Article 3 followed the failure of the Valley’s electrical supply during a heat event in 1980, which established that a person whose cooling has failed needs somewhere to go rather than a right to be cool at home. Article 4 was the response to conditions in the March’s prisons. Article 5 followed the deaths of workers whose employers had not compelled them to work and had not made stopping possible either. Article 6 followed a dispute about how many people the heat was killing, which the March resolved by requiring itself to say.

Article 7 is the important one constitutionally. The Chapter secures more than the American Rights Act does and says so, which is what section 7.3 of that Act permits: a polity may secure more and may not secure less. Chapter IX is the Realm’s principal example of a polity actually doing it, and the March’s heat provisions are studied by every polity that is getting hotter, which is most of them.

The Chapter’s enforcement is deliberately ordinary. There is no special tribunal; a person whose right is infringed sues in the March’s ordinary courts, and an employer, landlord or authority in breach is liable as for any other unlawful act. The March Heat Inspectorate, established in 1997, inspects, reports and prosecutes, and employs fewer inspectors for the whole March than the Valley alone employs environmental health officers.

Chapters X and XI

Chapter X as sealed constituted the courts, established the Supreme Court of Arizona, provided for the appointment of judges by the Lord Marcher on the advice of a commission, and secured their tenure and remuneration. Its modern form adds the Court’s jurisdiction over the Speaker’s certificate under Chapter V, added in 1953, and over the validity of measures passed without a required concurrent majority.

Chapter XI as sealed provided that an amendment required the assent of both chambers and of the Lord Marcher. Since 1953 an amendment is made by a measure of the Diet passed under Chapter V, Article 4, and assented to by the Lord Marcher, requiring no referendum, no federal consent, no second passage and no special majority of the chamber, the concurrent regional requirement doing the work a supermajority does elsewhere.

One additional consent is required in one case. Where an amendment would affect a compact right of a nation, the concurrence of the Council of Nations and Compacts is required, and this is the second and last of the two places in the instrument where the Council may decide rather than advise, the other being the emergency veto. The provision dates from 1974 and was the Diet’s answer to the nations’ demand for a general veto: they were given a veto over amendments touching their compacts and refused one over ordinary measures, which the nations describe as a power to protect what they already have and not to obtain anything.

Chapter XI also provides that an amendment inconsistent with the Charter of Union or with federal law is void to the extent of the inconsistency, and that an authenticated copy of every amendment shall be sent to the Clerk of the Parliaments within thirty days, which is the Polity Instruments Act’s deposit obligation written into the instrument itself.

The Diet in practice

The March Diet has ninety members, sits in Phoenix for a minimum of a hundred days a year and for at least ten elsewhere, and is elected for four years by mixed-member proportional representation corrected within each region rather than across the March.

The correction within regions is the constitutionally significant part and follows from Chapter IV, Article 2. A party’s strength in the Valley cannot supply it with members from the Eastern March, which means the Diet is assembled as six regional delegations rather than as one chamber, and the arithmetic of Chapter V operates on real political communities rather than on a notional map.

The chamber’s political blocs are regional as often as partisan, and three of them are named in the March’s ordinary speech. The Desert Labour bloc descends from the mining unions of the founding decades and is strongest in the Southern Desert and the old copper country. The Border Labour and Trade bloc draws from El Paso and the crossing districts and combines a labour politics with a commercial one that the federal parties find difficult to accommodate. The Basin Conservatives are the growth and property interest of Las Vegas and the St. George corridor. None of the three maps onto a federal party, all three cross federal party lines, and a High Steward’s majority is normally assembled from federal parties and regional blocs together.

The consequence is that the March’s ministries are coalitions almost without exception, and that the March’s politics are conducted with a good deal less partisan discipline than the Realm’s. A High Steward who has offended a region has lost a coalition partner, and a High Steward who has offended the Valley has lost a quarter of the chamber and can survive it.

The chamber’s four-year term dates from 1953 and is the abolition’s least noticed consequence. The Diet of 1884 was renewed every second year, which is what a lower chamber checked by an upper chamber can afford to be, and a single chamber holding the whole legislative power of the March was thought to need longer than two years to use it. The Highlands and the Basin opposed the extension in 1953 and have proposed a return to biennial elections eleven times since, on the reasoning that a chamber the regions can no longer veto ought at least to face its electors more often.

The Lord Marchership

The office is the only vice-regal office in a polity of the Realm with a substantive power of government attached to it, and for its first twenty-seven years it had no holder. The Charter’s transitional chapter provided that the Territorial Governor should “exercise the office of Lord Marcher until one be appointed”, and no ministry in New Westminster troubled to appoint one: the governor was already in Phoenix and cost nothing extra. From 1884 to 1911 the Lord Marchership was technically vacant, and five Territorial Governors exercised it, assenting to the Diet’s measures, commissioning High Stewards and holding the emergency authority, under a title the Charter did not otherwise mention.

Its character was not settled at once. The first three governors were soldiers, appointed on the assumption that a frontier polity required one: Conrad Zulick, a Union captain, from 1884 to 1889; Lewis Wolfley, a Union cavalry officer, from 1889 to 1897; and Alexander Brodie, who had ridden with the Rough Riders, from 1897 to 1905. Brodie’s use of the emergency authority against a mining strike in 1903 produced the constitutional crisis that shaped everything since. The proclamation was confirmed by a Diet that then spent two years regretting it, Brodie was not reappointed, and the convention that the authority is not used for public order dates precisely from there. Two civilian governors, the lawyers Joseph Kibbey and Richard Sloan, followed him, and the Diet spent their years pressing for the Charter’s office to be filled.

The first Lord Marcher was appointed in 1911, under the eight-year term adopted that year: George W. P. Hunt, who had been High Steward since 1905, apart from the weeks of 1907 between his dismissal and his return, and who held the office to 1919. It was Hunt who declined to proclaim during the deportation of the strikers in 1917, which settled the convention Brodie’s crisis had begun. There have been fifteen Lord Marchers since. Article 1 of Chapter VIII still lists breakdown of civil order as a condition, and no Lord Marcher has invoked it in a hundred and twenty-five years.

The office has since been held by lawyers, administrators, one bishop, three former High Stewards and two former members of the federal Commons. Barry Goldwater, 1987 to 1995, is the holder against whom the others are measured, and Gabrielle Giffords has held the office since 1 July 2027.

The eight-year non-renewable term, adopted in 1911 and matching the Realm’s vice-regal term, was a direct response to the 1903 crisis: a holder appointed at pleasure serves at the pleasure of whoever appointed them, and a holder with one fixed term and no prospect of another has nothing to gain by obliging a ministry.

The courts

Chapter X establishes the Supreme Court of Arizona, and the Court’s constitutional jurisdiction is wider than most polity courts hold, because the instrument gives it three distinct functions.

It construes the instrument, which every polity court does. It reviews the Speaker’s certificate under Chapter V, Article 5, which is unusual and is the source of the substance rule. And it determines the validity of measures of the Diet, which is to say that a March measure passed without the concurrent majority it required is void and the Court says so, a power the Realm’s federal courts do not hold over Acts of Parliament and which exists here because the March’s instrument is subordinate legislation in the constitutional hierarchy while an Act of Parliament is not.

Appeal lies to the Royal American Supreme Court, which has heard fourteen appeals from Arizona on constitutional questions and has reversed on three. Its most significant intervention was in 1969, when it held that Chapter VIII’s emergency authority is exercisable only as the instrument provides and that a proclamation defective in form is not saved by the urgency of the occasion, which is the authority the federal Part VII was later drafted against.

Judges are appointed by the Lord Marcher on the advice of a commission, hold office to a retiring age, and may be removed only on an address of the Diet passed by concurrent majority, which has never happened.

The emergency authority in practice

The authority of Chapter VIII has been used rarely, and in every instance for water or for heat.

There have been nineteen proclamations since 1884. Eleven concerned extremity of heat, five concerned failure or imminent failure of water supply, two concerned fire, and one concerned flooding. None has ever concerned a breakdown of civil order, although the condition is in Article 1 and although the March has had episodes that would have supported one, and the office’s refusal to use the authority for public order is the strongest of its conventions.

The office’s standing rests substantially on Barry Goldwater, Lord Marcher from 1987 to 1995, whose contribution was constitutional rather than political. He exercised the authority twice, both times for heat, both times for the minimum period, and he declined it on eleven recorded occasions including three on which a High Steward had advised it. His doctrine, stated in his reports and quoted since, is that frontier authority must be constitutional rather than personal, and that an emergency power used for the convenience of a ministry is not an emergency power but a second executive.

Goldwater is also the reason Article 7 of Chapter II exists in its present form. The requirement to report occasions on which the authority was considered and declined was enacted in 1996, the year after he left office, and was drafted from the practice he had adopted voluntarily.

Article 2 has been invoked once. In 1994 a Ministry that had lost the confidence of the Diet declined to advise a proclamation during a water failure in the Basin, and Goldwater acted without advice and stated that he had done so, in a report of four pages that is reprinted in the Realm’s constitutional textbooks. The Diet confirmed the proclamation within a week and the Ministry resigned within a month.

Water in practice

Chapter VI has produced a body of law that other polities borrow and cannot quite reproduce, because it depends on the definitional move at Article 1.

The two attempted transfers are the Chapter’s defining cases. In 1923 a syndicate acquired what it believed to be title to a canal system serving the Salt River valley and was held to have acquired nothing, the transfer being void from the beginning under Article 3 and no compensation arising because no property had passed. In 1988 a municipality attempted to lease its treatment works for thirty years, and the Supreme Court of Arizona held that a lease exceeding five years is a transfer within Article 3 whatever it is called, which is the leading authority on the Chapter and is the reason the March’s utilities are structured as they are.

Article 5’s statement requirement has been the more consequential provision over time. An authority that must state publicly and in writing the effect of an allocation on treaty water must first establish what that effect is, and the resulting body of investigation is the origin of most of what the March knows about its own groundwater. The nations have used Article 6 to void allocations eleven times since 1974, always on the ground that the statement was materially incomplete, and the March’s water authorities now employ more hydrologists than its universities do.

The aquifer is the unresolved problem and Chapter VI does not solve it. The Chapter governs how water is held, allocated and published, and says nothing whatever about how much may be taken. Article 8’s annual publication has made the decline undeniable and has not slowed it, and the Diet’s groundwater management legislation, which is ordinary legislation, is the most technically complex and politically contentious business the chamber conducts.

The nations in practice

The Council of Nations and Compacts sits in Phoenix, is composed as each nation determines, and has since 1974 held the consultative duty the federal Act imposes. One of its two formal sessions each year is held at Santa Fe, an arrangement made because the eastern nations, the Pueblos above all, declined to travel the length of the March for every sitting.

Its effectiveness is genuinely contested and the article does not resolve the contest. On one account the Council is the reason the March’s water allocations are the most carefully documented in the Realm, the reason Article 6 voidings are possible, and the reason the March consults where other polities inform. On the other, the Council has never once stopped a measure the Diet wished to pass, its objections are answered in writing and set aside, and a body whose entire power is to require an answer is a body that has been given a form of words.

Both accounts are supported by the record. The Missouri corridor litigation in the Dakotas and the March’s own infrastructure cases have established that section 43 of the American Rights Act has real teeth, and the nations of the March use the federal remedy as readily as the March one, which is itself a comment on the Council.

The nations’ constitutional position remains that they are parties to the instrument and are treated as consultees under it, and that the two things cannot both be right. The March’s answer, given at four constitutional reviews, is that Article 3 of Chapter I makes them parties and that the March’s courts construe every ambiguity in their favour accordingly, which is a real benefit and is not what they asked for.

The Declaration in practice

Chapter IX is enforced by ordinary proceedings in the March’s courts and by a small inspectorate, and it works unevenly.

Article 1, on disconnection, works completely. No dwelling in the March has had its water disconnected for non-payment since 1957, the utilities pursue arrears as debts like anybody else, and the March’s water utilities have bad debt levels that are unremarkable, which is the answer to the objection that was made at the time.

Article 2, on shade, works well in public space and unevenly at work. Shade at transit stops and public buildings is a visible and audited obligation. Shade at outdoor worksites is an obligation on employers, is enforced by inspection, and the inspection is thin.

Article 4, on maximum indoor temperature, is the most litigated and the least satisfied. It binds landlords, authorities and employers, and the March’s places of detention have been found in breach of it repeatedly, most recently in 2026, with the March’s own prisons the largest single category of proceedings under the Chapter.

Article 5, the right to stop work, is the newest and the hardest to use. A right exercisable only by a person who must then be believed about the temperature and must return to the same employer is a right with a practical cost, and the March’s labour organisations report that it is used far less than the conditions would justify.

Article 6 works, and is the Chapter’s quiet success. The March publishes every heat death within thirty days, with circumstances, and the publication is the reason each subsequent Article was enacted.

The constitutional controversy of 2028

The March’s live constitutional argument is Colorado’s Lost Southern Memory, and its durability comes from the fact that it is not a legal proceeding and cannot be one.

The March’s Highlands region includes the country around Durango, taken into the March at its creation in 1884 because the rivers that rise there flow south and west into the March’s system. The Free State of Colorado has never accepted the transfer, teaches it as a loss, and names Durango as its most emotionally resonant grievance.

Nothing is pending. There is no Colorado petition before Parliament, no proceeding in any court, and no referendum in prospect. The March’s boundary can be altered only by Parliament, since a polity boundary is a federal matter and no polity may cede territory to another by agreement; and within the March, the creation or alteration of a region requires a concurrent majority under Chapter V, Article 4, which the Highlands could not obtain and would not seek, because the Highlands’ own electorate is divided about it and its water interest lies with the March.

The grievance is therefore permanent, unlitigated and unresolvable, which is precisely why it endures. A claim that is pressed is a claim that can be lost. Colorado has never pressed it, and the March’s standing position, stated by successive High Stewards in almost identical language, is that the March would be glad to discuss the boundary at any time and that the headwaters are not negotiable, which is an offer to discuss the only thing nobody wants to discuss.

The water arithmetic is the whole of it. Durango’s highland country feeds rivers on which the March’s southern basins depend, and a March whose headwaters lay in another polity would be a March negotiating for its own supply. Every constitutional writer in the Realm has observed that this is exactly the position the March’s downstream neighbours are already in with respect to the March, and Arizona has never found a comfortable answer to the observation.

The grievance has a second life inside the March, and it is the more interesting one. The Highlands region is divided about itself. Durango’s own electorate contains a substantial body of opinion that regards the March as a distant desert government preoccupied with a metropolis three hundred miles away and eight thousand feet below, and another body which observes that the March’s water administration has protected the highland country’s own supply from precisely the interests that would otherwise have taken it. The second view has always prevailed and has never been overwhelming, and the Highlands’ members in the Diet are consequently the most cautious in the chamber about anything touching the boundary.

Colorado’s own position is more restrained than its rhetoric. Successive Free State ministries have taught the loss, commemorated it, and declined to petition for it, which the March reads as evidence that Colorado wants the grievance more than the territory. Colorado’s constitutional lawyers have advised, and the advice has leaked twice, that a petition would probably fail, that failure would extinguish a claim now maintained indefinitely by not being tested, and that the Free State’s interest lies in continuing to say that Durango was taken rather than in finding out whether it can be recovered.

The Register records the grievance as genuine and the arrangement as stable, and takes no view on whether the boundary of 1884 was justly drawn. The March’s own historians concede that the highland country was included for its water and not for its people, that its people were not asked, and that the same is true of a great deal of the Realm’s internal geography.

The instrument compared

The March Charter is one of two polity instruments the Register treats at length, and the comparison with the Constitution of Louisiane is instructive because the two are opposite in almost every respect.

Louisiane’s instrument was written by a constituent assembly in 1804 for a population that had just been transferred without being consulted, and it has never been replaced because it is difficult to amend and because the Grand Duchy’s constitutional life has run largely through interpretation. The March’s was sealed by three parties in 1884 and has never been replaced because it is easy to amend and has been amended a hundred and thirty-five times.

Louisiane’s is short, elegant, and derived from a civil law tradition; the March’s is long, accreted and derived from nothing in particular. Louisiane’s declaration of rights is universal in the eighteenth-century manner; the March’s is specific to the point of prescribing an indoor temperature. Louisiane’s language question is unresolved and is the polity’s defining tension; the March’s was resolved in 1948 by re-enacting the whole instrument in two languages, which Louisiane has never attempted and which its own scholars regard as impossible there.

What the two share is that neither has been replaced, which distinguishes them from most of the Realm’s polities. Several have had three constitutions and one has had five, and the Realm’s constitutional writing treats the March and Louisiane as the two demonstrations that an instrument survives either by being flexible or by being revered, and that a polity which achieves neither will be writing another one within a lifetime.

The unrepealed provisions

The instrument carries provisions that are dead, unenforceable or embarrassing, and the March has repealed almost none of them, on the settled view that an instrument amended a hundred and thirty-five times should keep the record of what it used to say.

The residence and property qualification for the Diet is the one that draws comment. Chapter IV as sealed required a member of the Diet to have resided in the March for three years and to hold real property within it of a stated value. The property requirement has been of no effect since 1962, when the American Rights Act’s extension made it unlawful, and it has never been repealed. It sits in the printed text, marked in the official edition with a footnote recording that it is spent, and the March’s answer to periodic proposals for its removal is that a polity which deletes its embarrassments has a shorter constitution and a worse memory.

Chapter II’s 1884 description of the nations as being “under the protection of the March” was removed in 1974 and is the one provision the March did delete, on the nations’ request and without argument.

The instrument in public life

The March Charter is read, quoted and argued about by ordinary Arizonans to a degree that surprises visitors and that the March regards as unremarkable.

The reason is Chapter IX. A constitution that prescribes a maximum indoor temperature and a right to stop work in the heat is a constitution that people have occasion to consult, and the March’s courts hear Chapter IX proceedings brought by individuals in numbers that no other polity instrument generates. The March’s schools teach the instrument as a practical document rather than as a founding one, the standard school edition prints Chapter IX first and Chapter I last, and the March’s own constitutional writers regard this inversion as correct.

The instrument’s most quoted phrase is from Chapter VI, Article 1, that water is not the subject of ownership, and it is quoted in circumstances the Article does not cover, chiefly by people arguing that something else should not be the subject of ownership either. Its second most quoted is Goldwater’s, which is not in the instrument at all: that frontier authority must be constitutional rather than personal.

Charter Day in the March is 14 May, the date of the sealing, and it is observed with a public reading of Chapter IX in Phoenix and of Chapter VI in the basin towns, a practice that began in the 1970s and that nobody legislated.

The unresolved questions

Three questions about the instrument are open and none is close to settlement.

The first is the aquifer. Chapter VI governs how water is held, allocated, transferred and published, and says nothing about how much may be taken. The groundwater beneath the Valley, the Southern Desert and the St. George corridor is being drawn down faster than it recharges, Article 8’s annual publication makes the fact undeniable, and the instrument supplies no constitutional answer at all. The Diet legislates on it by ordinary measure, which means by simple majority, which means the Valley can carry it. Whether a constitutional water chapter that does not limit extraction is a water chapter at all is the question the March’s own lawyers ask, and the proposal to add an extraction limit to Chapter VI has been introduced four times and has never obtained its four regions.

The second is whether the emergency authority reaches a slow emergency. Chapter VIII’s conditions are drafted for events: a failure, an extremity, a fire, a flood, a breakdown. An aquifer declining across forty years is none of these, and yet it will produce, on the March’s own published figures, precisely the failure of water supply that Article 1 contemplates. A Lord Marcher who proclaimed an emergency over a slow decline would be acting outside the settled understanding of the Chapter and arguably inside its words, and no Lord Marcher has been willing to find out.

The third is the nations’ standing, which is the oldest of the three and is set out above. It has been unresolved since 1884, was narrowed rather than answered in 1974, and is raised at every constitutional review.

Assessment

The March Charter is the most practical constitution in the Realm and the least tidy.

It was written for permanent conditions rather than for a moment, which is why it has survived: heat, water, distance, a border, military land, Indigenous sovereignty and the risk that one metropolis swallows a polity are not problems that a settlement resolves, and the instrument treats them as facts to be governed rather than questions to be answered. Its two distinctive doctrines, that water is constitutional and not commercial and that regional balance is constitutional, are both refusals to let an ordinary majority decide something the March judged too structural for one, and both have held.

Its declaration of desert rights is the Realm’s clearest instance of a polity securing more than the federal instrument requires, and it is dated in its own text so that nobody can mistake it for an inheritance. Its emergency authority is the only one of its kind in the Realm and has been used nineteen times in a hundred and forty-four years, never for public order, which is a record of restraint that the office’s holders built deliberately and that no provision compelled.

Its failure is the one it was signed with. The nations were parties to the covenant and were given a body that could speak and could not decide, they understood the bargain and took it because the alternative was no standing at all, and it took federal legislation in 1962 and an amendment in 1974 for the March to give them what the Realm by then required of everybody. A polity whose founding instrument records the nations as signatories has secured for them, in the end, the same protection as a polity where they are merely resident. That is the March’s oldest unanswered argument, and the Diet has neither answered it nor conceded it in a hundred and forty-four years.

There is a second criticism which the March finds harder to hear because it comes from its admirers. The instrument is very good at preventing things and comparatively poor at requiring them. Water may not be owned, the works may not be sold, a basin authority may not be abolished, an allocation may not be made without a statement, an emergency may not run past ninety days, and a measure of six named classes may not pass on one region’s votes. Each prohibition is well drawn and each has held. But the March’s largest problem, that it is taking water it does not have, is a problem of action rather than of restraint, and an instrument built to stop a Diet from doing things has nothing to say to a Diet that will not do one.

The March’s answer, given by its constitutional writers rather than by its politicians, is that a frontier instrument’s proper business is restraint, that the drafters of 1884 were legislating against the capture of a desert’s water by whoever could pay for it and succeeded completely, and that no constitution has ever solved a problem its polity was unwilling to face. The answer is fair and it is not a solution, and the aquifer continues to fall.

The Polity Instruments Act and the other polities

The requirement that every polity hold a constitution has produced forty-nine instruments of remarkable variety, and the Register notes the range here because the March’s is at one extreme of it.

The oldest in substance are the original Provinces’, several of which are consolidations of colonial charters, assembly practice and custom that the Act of 1889 obliged them to write down in one place. Massachusetts Bay’s and Connecticut’s both begin with recitals of instruments predating the Charter of Union. The shortest is Vermont’s, which the Republic deposited in 1891 substantially as it had stood since 1777 and which runs to fewer words than the March’s Chapter VI. The most frequently replaced is a Gulf polity now on its fifth instrument, each replacement following a political crisis the previous one had failed to survive.

The Grand Duchies are constitutionally distinct, their instruments having to accommodate a reigning house alongside an elected ministry, and Louisiane’s and Michigan’s differ from one another as much as either differs from the March’s. The Kingdoms stand apart again: Hawaiʻi’s instrument rests on the Treaty of Honolulu, and Alaska’s Constitution of 1889 annexes the accession settlement of 1884, which is not a treaty. The Columbia District deposits an instrument although it is not a polity, by a separate provision of the Act, and the Territory of Loreto does not, its status being unsettled.

What no polity instrument may do is secure less than the law of the Realm secures, which is the Rights Act’s section 7.2 operating on every one of them, and which is what forced the March’s amendment of 1974 and has forced comparable amendments in eleven other polities since 1962.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The March of Arizona: the polity this instrument governs
• Constitution of Louisiane: the Realm’s other polity instrument treated at length
• Charter of Union of the American Colonies: to which every polity instrument is subject
• American Rights Act: whose section 43 forced the amendment of 1974, and whose section 7.3 permits Chapter IX
• Barry Goldwater: Lord Marcher 1987 to 1995
• Salt River Project: the works Chapter VI makes inalienable
• Institutions and Government

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Institutions · Law · Constitutions · Polities · Arizona · Water · Indigenous Nations