Responding to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional AmendmentSanford Levinson An increasing number of constitutional theorists, within both the legal academy and university departments of government, are focusing on the conceptual and political problems attached to the notion of constitutional amendment. Amendments are, among other things, recognitions of the imperfection of existing schemes of government. The relative ease or difficulty of amendment has significant implications for the ways that governments respond to problems that call either for new structures of governance or new powers for already established structures. This book brings together essays by leading legal authorities and political scientists on a range of questions from whether the U.S. Constitution is subject to amendment by procedures other than those authorized by Article V to how significant change is conceptualized within classical rabbinic Judaism. Though the essays are concerned for the most part with the American experience, other constitutional traditions are considered as well. |
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... Bill of Rights. Nonetheless, states sporadically ratified the original second amendment, and in 1992 Michigan became the thirty-eighth state to ratify it. Given a union of fifty states, that meant that three-quarters of these states, in ...
... bill providing for internal improvements. He readily acknowledged “the great importance of roads and canals” and the “signal advantage to the general prosperity” of their improvement. Yet he saw the bill as going beyond the enumerated ...
... bill establishing the second Bank, which he had signed as president, he had never formally repudiated his opposition, on constitutional grounds, to the first Bank, and he was clearly disturbed by the breadth of Marshall's opinion ...
... Bill of Rights as a Constitution,” Yale Law Journal 100 (1991): 1131, 1181. The takings clause might therefore, at least as a theoretical proposition, have been given its own separate number. Similarly, it would not have violated any ...
... Bill of Rights” to the 1787 Constitution. Supporters of the Philadelphia handiwork insisted that no such additions were required to achieve the ends articulated by anti-Federalists, for the national Constitution, unlike its state ...
Other editions - View all
Responding to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment Sanford Levinson No preview available - 1995 |
Responding to Imperfection: The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Amendment Sanford Levinson No preview available - 1995 |