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Syracuse University’s Student Government Association passed new revisions to its constitution to be voted on by the board of elections during an executive session at its meeting Monday.

Valeria Serrano, SGA’s director of communications, confirmed the assembly’s passage of the revisions in a statement to The Daily Orange Tuesday. The student body will have the final vote in a constitutional referendum during the SGA election from March 30 to April 3.

The revised constitution will include the removal of its supreme court, SGA President German Nolivos told The D.O. before Monday’s meeting. Additional changes include modifying the constitution’s language and reworking the tier funding system.

The supreme court replaced the SGA judicial board four to five years ago, which interpreted the constitution, bylaws and impeachment procedures, Nolivos said. The court currently consists of a chief justice, deputy chief justice, senior associate justice and eight associate justices. The court, justices and trials are governed by a set of judicial codes.

SGA has five governing documents: the constitution, the bylaws, the fiscal codes, the ethics codes and the election codes. The goal of the new constitution is to consolidate the fiscal, ethics and election codes into the bylaws, Nolivos said.

Nolivos said SGA decided to change the constitution and ultimately dismantle the supreme court, after the body placed an injunction on SGA while it previously attempted to change its bylaws. He said SGA wanted the assembly’s administrative actions added to the constitution, which the supreme court deemed unconstitutional, due to the document’s “confusing” language.

Nolivos explained the current constitution also contains contradictions, grammatical mistakes and confusing language, leading the assembly to add revisions.

“I was reading our constitution, reading our bylaws, and I was like, ‘I don’t understand anything that this document says right now,’” Nolivos said.

This prompted SGA to send its constitution to university administration for feedback and suggestions, where SU suggested a constitutional rewrite, Nolivos said. The university did not offer revisions or specific changes, an SU spokesperson said in a statement to The D.O. Monday.

“We did not offer content direction; that work has been led by SGA, though they have asked us to review and provide feedback on their drafts,” the spokesperson said.

Through revising the constitution, problems with the concept of a supreme court became apparent to the assembly, Nolivos said. Because of the many senior positions in SGA, Nolivos found younger members of the assembly beginning to fill empty seats on the court every semester.

While Nolivos said he is excited by increased underclassmen participation, he expressed concerns about the supreme court’s “overall veto power” over constitutional matters, which could create scenarios where the assembly and its most experienced members could be overruled by a small group with less time in student government.

To address these problems, the new constitution will remove the supreme court and create a constitutional committee to conduct future interpretations of the constitution and its bylaws. This decision gives more power back to the assembly, such as through votes or veto power for impeachments, Nolivos said.

The revised constitution will also rework the funding tier system, Nolivos said. SGA’s previous budget cuts and unbalanced fund allocation under the current tier system created an ineffective structure for registered student organizations to receive funding.

“People hate the tier system. It doesn’t work. It’s old. It’s outdated,” Nolivos said.

The new system will decide an organization’s funding by its number of members and activities, activity status throughout the year and student engagement, Nolivos said. The organizations will be evaluated yearly and will be able to move up and down tiers based on performance.

The new constitution will also install a director of Greek life relations, Nolivos said. He also said it will remove the “unique population representative” from the constitution, citing difficulty in selecting one person to “represent the beliefs of an entire population.”

Students will be able to vote on the constitution referendum as part of next week’s SGA elections.

DISCLAIMER: Valeria Serrano is an advertising sales representative at The Daily Orange. She did not influence the editorial content of this article.

Senior Staff Writer Duncan Green contributed reporting for this article.

Published on March 24, 2026 at 10:07 pm