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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... convention in Philadelphia with a forthright statement that “the plan now to be formed will certainly be defective, as the Confederation has been found on trial to be. Amendments therefore will be necessary, and it will be better to ...
... Convention (New York: Oxford Univerity Press, 1988), p. 14. 4 See Willi Paul Adams, The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era (Chapel Hill: University of ...
... Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three ...
... convention? Could its agenda be limited to any given topics mentioned by the states, or would the convention have plenary power, free in effect to be as wide-ranging in defining imperfection and proposing potential solutions as was the ...
... conventions, or, indeed, science,11 but, rather, on the particular problem of explaining change within practices that are derived, in terms of their own self-presentation, from certain specifiable foundational texts. From a somewhat ...
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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 |