Coleman v. Miller is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court in 1939 [307 U.S. 433] which clarified that if the Congress of the United States, when proposing for ratification an amendment to the United States Constitution chooses not to specify a deadline within which the state legislatures (or conventions held in the states) must act upon the proposed amendment, then the amendment remains pending business before the state legislatures (or conventions). It is none other than the Congress itself, if and when it should later be confronted with valid ratifications from the required number of states, which has the discretion to arbitrate the question of whether too much time has intervened between Congress' initial proposal of the amendment and the most recent state ratification thereof assuming that — as a consequence of that most recent action — the legislatures (or conventions) of at least three-fourths of the states have approved the amendment at one time or another. This court decision formed the basis of the belated and unusual ratification of the Twenty-seventh Amendment to the United States Constitution. Thus far in American history, the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution is the only one that was submitted to special ratifying conventions in the states rather than to the state legislatures for ratification.
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