In our popular imagination, constitutions are celebrated as the product of the free will of a people exercising their sovereign power. It is taken for granted that modern constitutions are rooted in the consent of the governed, that they reflect a stable settlement among the people and that, as John Locke once wrote, they are the ultimate expression of the voluntary judgment of the people to ‘enter into society to make one people, one body politic, under one supreme government’.1 The most famous phrase in any constitution in the history of the world—‘We the People’, the preambular words that open the door to the United States Constitution—only reinforces this view. And yet it is the rare constitution that springs directly in design and ratification from the considered judgment of the people themselves. Iceland came close in its failed but fascinating effort to crowdsource its new constitution in 2013.2 Constitutions are more often the product of elite negotiations with no authentic representativeness. They may alternatively be held up as the result of mediated choices made on behalf of or in the name of the people, whether or not the people have in fact been consulted in a meaningful way. It is true, however, that constitutions are increasingly requiring some form of public approval before coming into force.