730 But the events themselves muddied this neat priority of legislation and constituent authority. In neither of its judgments did the Supreme Court question the constitutionality of the legislation creating the convention nor the potential for its acts, after popular ratification, to replace the previous constitution. It reached these conclusions even though the existing constitution had provided what appeared to be an exclusive method of constitutional change, a method which had been entirely disregarded in the process under consideration. In a paradoxical argument, the court acknowledged that the convention procedure was a way of expressing the original will of the sovereign people--something outside the positive law rules of the constitution--but that procedure was cognizable as such only because it was authorized by the positive law of the enabling legislation.74 More strikingly, by the time the Supreme Court was able to issue its judgment in the appeal from Judge Stowe’s decision, the convention’s draft had already been approved in the referendum and had, in most respects, been in force for almost a year. The Court did nothing to cast doubt on the validity of that adoption. Before launching its peroration on the limited powers of the convention, it conceded that “[t]he change made by the people in their political institutions, by the adoption of the proposed Constitution since the [issuance of the] decree [appealed from] forbids an inquiry into the