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Constitutional Amendments: Making, Breaking, and Changing Constitutions is both a roadmap for navigating the intellectual universe of constitutional amendments and a blueprint for building and improving the rules of constitutional change. This book blends theory with practice to answer two all important questions: what is an amendment and how should constitutional designers structure the procedures of constitutional amendment?
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- Contents
- Introduction-Uncharted Terrain in Constitutional Amendment
- Part One: Forms and Functions
- Chapter I-Why Amendment Rules?
- Chapter II-The Boundaries of Constitutional Amendment
- Part Two: Flexibility and Rigidity
- Chapter III-Measuring Amendment Difficulty
- Chapter IV-The Three Varieties of Unamendability
- Part Three: Creation and Reform
- Chapter V-The Architecture of Constitutional Amendment
- Chapter VI-Finding Constitutional Amendments
- Conclusion-The Rules of Law
About the author
Richard Albert is the William Stamps Farish Professor in Law at the University of Texas at Austin.
Summary
Constitutional Amendments: Making, Breaking, and Changing Constitutions is both a roadmap for navigating the intellectual universe of constitutional amendments and a blueprint for building and improving the rules of constitutional change. Drawing from dozens of constitutions in every region of the world, this book blends theory with practice to answer two all-important questions: what is an amendment and how should constitutional designers structure the procedures of constitutional change? The first matters now more than ever. Reformers are exploiting the rules of constitutional amendment, testing the limits of legal constraint, undermining the norms of democratic government, and flouting the constitution as written to create entirely new constitutions that masquerade as ordinary amendments. The second question is central to the performance and endurance of constitutions. Constitutional designers today have virtually no resources to guide them in constructing the rules of amendment, and scholars do not have a clear portrait of the significance of amendment rules in the project of constitutionalism. This book shows that no part of a constitution is more important than the procedures we use change it. Amendment rules open a window into the soul of a constitution, exposing its deepest vulnerabilities and revealing its greatest strengths. The codification of amendment rules often at the end of the text proves that last is not always least.
Additional text
In this conceptually and geographically wide-ranging work, Richard Albert demonstrates why the topic of constitutional amendment has become central in the contemporary study of comparative constitutional law. This exceptionally important book should give scholars in the field ideas that they must incorporate into their work, whatever their specific concerns are.
