Exercise 2: The 22nd Amendment as an Unwritten Norm Turned Hard Law — Possible Solution
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The chapter draws this parallel directly, and working through both
halves side by side shows exactly why it holds.

THE UK PARALLEL (UK POLITICS FUNDAMENTALS, CHAPTER 4)
The 1999 House of Lords Act removed almost all hereditary peers but,
as a real political compromise, allowed 92 of them to remain as a
supposedly "temporary" arrangement. That temporary arrangement was
never a hard legal deadline - it was a norm everyone understood was
meant to be provisional. It lasted a real 27 years, unchanged, until
the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2026 finally converted it
into permanent, formal law by removing the remaining hereditary seats
outright.

THE US CASE (THIS CHAPTER)
The two-term limit on the presidency worked the same way for even
longer. Nothing in the original Constitution capped how many terms a
president could serve. George Washington's own personal choice to
step down after two terms became, by long-standing custom rather than
law, the expected norm - every president who followed him respected
it for roughly 150 years. That norm had no legal force at all; it was
simply what everyone assumed a president would do, the same way
everyone assumed the 92 hereditary peers were a genuinely temporary
fix.

THE SAME STRUCTURAL PATTERN
Both stories follow an identical three-part shape:

  1. An informal norm holds for a very long time (Washington's
     precedent: ~150 years; the 92 hereditary peers: 27 years).
  2. A specific real event breaks that norm out in the open (FDR
     winning a third and then a fourth term in 1940 and 1944; the
     political pressure that finally produced the 2026 Act).
  3. Only once the norm has visibly broken does the legal system
     respond by writing a hard rule into actual law (the 22nd
     Amendment, ratified 1951; the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers)
     Act 2026).

In both cases, the informal custom did real work for a long stretch of
time on its own - right up until it didn't, at which point Parliament
or Congress converted the unwritten expectation into an enforceable
legal rule.

ANSWER: The 22nd Amendment is a good example of an unwritten norm
becoming hard law because it follows the exact same three-step pattern
as UK Politics Fundamentals' own hereditary-peers story: a long-held
informal custom (Washington's two-term precedent, ~150 years; the
"temporary" 92 hereditary peers, 27 years) held until a specific real
event broke it visibly (FDR's third and fourth terms; the pressure
behind the 2026 reform), after which the legal system formalized what
had only ever been a norm into an actual binding rule (the 22nd
Amendment, 1951; the 2026 Act).

WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER
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It lays the two real stories side by side and identifies the shared
three-step structure (long-held norm, a breaking event, formal
codification) explicitly, rather than just asserting the two cases
are similar without showing the actual parallel mechanism.