The Foundations and Traditions of Constitutional Amendment

The Foundations and Traditions of Constitutional Amendment

Richard Albert, Xenophon Contiades, Alkmene Fotiadou (Eds.), The Foundations and Traditions of Constitutional Amendment (Hart Publishing 2017).

There is growing interest in constitutional amendment from a comparative perspective. Comparative constitutional amendment is the study of how constitutions change through formal and informal means, including alteration, revision, evolution, interpretation, replacement and revolution. The field invites scholars to draw insights about constitutional change across borders and cultures, to uncover the motivations behind constitutional change, to theorise best practices, and to identify the theoretical underpinnings of constitutional change.

This volume is designed to guide the emergence of comparative constitutional amendment as a distinct field of study in public law. Much of the recent scholarship in the field has been written by the scholars assembled in this volume. This book, like the field it hopes to shape, is not comparative alone; it is also doctrinal, historical and theoretical, and therefore offers a multiplicity of perspectives on a subject about which much remains to be written.

This book aspires to be the first to address comprehensively the new dimensions of the study of constitutional amendment, and will become a reference point for all scholars working on the subject. The volume covers all of the topics where innovative work is being done, such as the notion of the people, the trend of empirical quantitative approaches to constitutional change, unamendability, sunrise clauses, constitutional referenda, the conventional divide between constituent and constituted powers, among other important subjects. It creates a dialogue that cuts through these innovative conceptualisations and highlights scholarly disagreement and, in so doing, puts ideas to the test. The volume therefore captures the fierce ongoing debates on the relevant topics, it reveals the current trends and contested issues, and it offers a variety of arguments elaborated by prominent experts in the field. It will open the way for further dialogue.

Table of contents

Introduction: The State of the Art in Constitutional Amendment
Richard Albert

  1. Amendment Power, Constituent Power, and Popular Sovereignty: Linking Unamendability and Amendment Procedures
    Yaniv Roznai
  2. Constitutional Theory and Cognitive Estrangement: Beyond Revolutions, Amendments and Constitutional Moments
    Zoran Oklopcic
  3. Constraints on Constitutional Amendment Powers
    Oran Doyle
  4. Comment on Doyle’s Constraints on Constitutional Amendment Powers
    Mark Tushnet
  5. Constituting the Amendment Power: A Framework for Comparative Amendment Law
    Thomaz Pereira
  6. Sieyès: The Spirit of Constitutional Democracy?
    Luisa Fernanda García López
  7. Revolutionary Reform in Venezuela: Electoral Rules and Historical Narratives in the Creation of the 1999 Constitution
    Joshua Braver
  8. ‘Revolutionary Reform’ and the Seduction of Constitutionalism
    Juliano Zaiden Benvindo
  9. Constitutional Sunrise
    Sofia Ranchordás
  10. Constitutional Change and Interest Group Politics: Ireland’s Children’s Rights Referendum
    Oran Doyle and David Kenny
  11. Amendment-Metrics: The Good, the Bad and the Frequently Amended Constitution
    Xenophon Contiades and Alkmene Fotiadou
  12. Comment on Amendment-Metrics: The Good, the Bad and the Frequently Amended Constitution
    James E Fleming
  13. Constituting ‘the People’: The Paradoxical Place of the Formal Amendment Procedure in Australian Constitutionalism
    Lael K Weis
  14. Hard Amendment Cases in Canada
    Kate Glover
  15. Formal Amendment Rules and Constitutional Endurance: The Strange Case of the Commonwealth Caribbean
    Derek O’Brien
  16. The French People’s Role in Amending the Constitution: A French Constitutional Analysis from a Pure Legal Perspective
    Jean-Philippe Derosier
  17. The Implication of Conflation of Normal and ‘Constitutional Politics’ on Constitutional Change in Africa
    Duncan Okubasu
  18. Direct Democracy and Constitutional Change in the US: Institutional Learning from State Laboratories
    Jurgen Goossens

Conclusion: The Emergence of Comparative Constitutional Amendment as a New Discipline: Towards a Paradigm Shift
Xenophon Contiades and Alkmene Fotiadou