Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Change written by Xenophon Contiades and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-11 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparative constitutional change has recently emerged as a distinct field in the study of constitutional law. It is the study of the way constitutions change through formal and informal mechanisms, including amendment, replacement, total and partial revision, adaptation, interpretation, disuse and revolution. The shift of focus from constitution-making to constitutional change makes sense, since amendment power is the means used to refurbish constitutions in established democracies, enhance their adaptation capacity and boost their efficacy. Adversely, constitutional change is also the basic apparatus used to orchestrate constitutional backslide as the erosion of liberal democracies and democratic regression is increasingly affected through legal channels of constitutional change. Routledge Handbook of Comparative Constitutional Change provides a comprehensive reference tool for all those working in the field and a thorough landscape of all theoretical and practical aspects of the topic. Coherence from this aspect does not suggest a common view, as the chapters address different topics, but reinforces the establishment of comparative constitutional change as a distinct field. The book brings together the most respected scholars working in the field, and presents a genuine contribution to comparative constitutional studies, comparative public law, political science and constitutional history.

Download or read book The People s Constitution written by John F. Kowal and published by The New Press. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 493 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 233-year story of how the American people have taken an imperfect constitution—the product of compromises and an artifact of its time—and made it more democratic Who wrote the Constitution? That’s obvious, we think: fifty-five men in Philadelphia in 1787. But much of the Constitution was actually written later, in a series of twenty-seven amendments enacted over the course of two centuries. The real history of the Constitution is the astonishing story of how subsequent generations have reshaped our founding document amid some of the most colorful, contested, and controversial battles in American political life. It’s a story of how We the People have improved our government’s structure and expanded the scope of our democracy during eras of transformational social change. The People’s Constitution is an elegant, sobering, and masterly account of the evolution of American democracy. From the addition of the Bill of Rights, a promise made to save the Constitution from near certain defeat, to the post–Civil War battle over the Fourteenth Amendment, from the rise and fall of the “noble experiment” of Prohibition to the defeat and resurgence of an Equal Rights Amendment a century in the making, The People’s Constitution is the first book of its kind: a vital guide to America’s national charter, and an alternative history of the continuing struggle to realize the Framers’ promise of a more perfect union.

Download or read book Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings and Constitutional Change written by Paul M. Collins and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-06-24 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book demonstrates that the hearings to confirm Supreme Court nominees are in fact a democratic forum for the discussion and ratification of constitutional change.

Download or read book Oregon Blue Book written by Oregon. Office of the Secretary of State and published by . This book was released on 1895 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Responding to Imperfection written by Sanford Levinson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1995-01-24 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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. The contributors include Bruce Ackerman, Akhil Reed Amar, Mark E. Brandon, David R. Dow, Stephen M. Griffin, Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein, Sanford Levinson, Donald Lutz, Walter Murphy, Frederick Schauer, John R. Vile, and Noam J. Zohar.

Download or read book Constitutional Amendments written by Richard Albert and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-15 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Participatory Constitutional Change written by Xenophon Contiades and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-10-04 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the recent trend of enhancing the role of the people in constitutional change. It traces the reasons underlying this tendency, the new ways in which it takes form, the possibilities of success and failure of such ventures as well as the risks and benefits it carries. To do so, it examines the theoretical aspects of public participation in constitutional decision-making, offers an analysis of the benefits gained and the problems encountered in countries with long-standing experience in the practice of constitutional referendums, discusses the recent innovative constitution-making processes employed in Iceland and Ireland in the post financial crisis context and probes the use of public participation in the EU context. New modes of deliberation are juxtaposed to traditional direct-democratic processes, while the reasons behind this re-emergence of public involvement narratives are discussed from the aspect of comparative constitutional design. The synthetic chapter offers an overview of the emerging normative and comparative issues and provides a holistic approach of the role of the people in constitutional change in an attempt to answer when, where and how this role may be successfully enhanced. The work consists of material specifically written for this volume, and authored by prominent constitutional scholars and experts in public participation and deliberative processes.

Download or read book American Government 3e written by Glen Krutz and published by . This book was released on 2023-05-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Black & white print. American Government 3e aligns with the topics and objectives of many government courses. Faculty involved in the project have endeavored to make government workings, issues, debates, and impacts meaningful and memorable to students while maintaining the conceptual coverage and rigor inherent in the subject. With this objective in mind, the content of this textbook has been developed and arranged to provide a logical progression from the fundamental principles of institutional design at the founding, to avenues of political participation, to thorough coverage of the political structures that constitute American government. The book builds upon what students have already learned and emphasizes connections between topics as well as between theory and applications. The goal of each section is to enable students not just to recognize concepts, but to work with them in ways that will be useful in later courses, future careers, and as engaged citizens. In order to help students understand the ways that government, society, and individuals interconnect, the revision includes more examples and details regarding the lived experiences of diverse groups and communities within the United States. The authors and reviewers sought to strike a balance between confronting the negative and harmful elements of American government, history, and current events, while demonstrating progress in overcoming them. In doing so, the approach seeks to provide instructors with ample opportunities to open discussions, extend and update concepts, and drive deeper engagement.

Download or read book Unintended Consequences of Constitutional Amendment written by David E. Kyvig and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Constitutional amendments, like all laws, may lead to unanticipated and even undesired outcomes. In this collection of original essays, a team of distinguished historians, political scientists, and legal scholars led by award-winning constitutional historian David E. Kyvig examines significant instances in which reform produced something other than the foreseen result. An opening essay examines the intentions of the Constitution’s framers in creating an amending mechanism and then explores unexpected uses of that instrument. Thereafter, authors focus on the Bill of Rights and subsequent amendments, addressing such subjects as criminal justice procedures, the presidential election system, the Civil War’s impact on race and gender relations, the experiment in national prohibition, women’s suffrage, and, finally, limits on the presidency. Together these contributions illuminate aspects of constitutional stability and evolution, challenging current thinking about reform within the formal system of change provided by Article V of the Constitution. Forcefully demonstrating that constitutional law is not immune to unanticipated consequences, the eight scholars underscore the need for care, responsibility, and historical awareness in altering the nation’s fundamental law.

Download or read book Routledge Handbook of Constitutional Law written by Mark Tushnet and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-06-26 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Constitutional Law is an advanced level reference work which surveys the current state of constitutional law. Featuring new, specially commissioned papers by a range of leading scholars from around the world, it offers a comprehensive overview of the field as well as identifying promising avenues for future research. The book presents the key issues in constitutional law thematically allowing for a truly comparative approach to the subject. It also pays particular attention to constitutional design, identifying and evaluating various solutions to the challenges involved in constitutional architecture. The book is split into four parts for ease of reference: Part One: General issues "sets issues of constitutional law firmly in context including topics such as the making of constitutions, the impact of religion and culture on constitutions, and the relationship between international law and domestic constitutions. Part Two: Structures presents different approaches in regard to institutions or state organization and structural concepts such as emergency powers and electoral systems Part Three: Rights covers the key rights often enshrined in constitutions Part Four: New Challenges - explores issues of importance such as migration and refugees, sovereignty under pressure from globalization, Supranational Organizations and their role in creating post-conflict constitutions, and new technological challenges. Providing up-to-date and authoritative articles covering all the key aspects of constitutional law, this reference work is essential reading for advanced students, scholars and practitioners in the field.

Download or read book Six Amendments written by John Paul Stevens and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2014-02-18 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time ever, a retired Supreme Court Justice offers a manifesto on how the Constitution needs to change. By the time of his retirement in June 2010, John Paul Stevens had become the second longest serving Justice in the history of the Supreme Court. Now he draws upon his more than three decades on the Court, during which he was involved with many of the defining decisions of the modern era, to offer a book like none other. Six Amendments is an absolutely unprecedented call to arms, detailing six specific ways in which the Constitution should be amended in order to protect our democracy and the safety and wellbeing of American citizens. Written with the same precision and elegance that made Stevens's own Court opinions legendary for their clarity as well as logic, Six Amendments is a remarkable work, both because of its unprecedented nature and, in an age of partisan ferocity, its inarguable common sense.

Download or read book Constitutional Change and Democracy in Indonesia written by Donald L. Horowitz and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-25 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did democracy became entrenched in the world's largest Muslim-majority country? After the fall of its authoritarian regime in 1998, Indonesia pursued an unusual course of democratization. It was insider-dominated and gradualist and it involved free elections before a lengthy process of constitutional reform. At the end of the process, Indonesia's amended constitution was essentially a new and thoroughly democratic document. By proceeding as they did, the Indonesians averted the conflict that would have arisen between adherents of the old constitution and proponents of radical, immediate reform. Donald L. Horowitz documents the decisions that gave rise to this distinctive constitutional process. He then traces the effects of the new institutions on Indonesian politics and discusses their shortcomings and their achievements in steering Indonesia away from the dangers of polarization and violence. He also examines the Indonesian story in the context of comparative experience with constitutional design and intergroup conflict.

Download or read book The Death of Treaty Supremacy written by David Sloss and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides the first detailed history of the Constitution's treaty supremacy rule. It describes a process of invisible constitutional change. The treaty supremacy rule was a bedrock principle of constitutional law for more than 150 years. It provided that treaties are supreme over state law and that courts have a constitutional duty to apply treaties that conflict with state laws. The rule ensured that state governments did not violate U.S. treaty obligations without authorization from the federal political branches. In 1945, the United States ratified the UN Charter, which obligates nations to promote human rights “for all without distinction as to race.” In 1950, a California court applied the Charter’s human rights provisions along with the traditional supremacy rule to invalidate a state law that discriminated against Japanese nationals. The implications were shocking: the decision implied that the United States had abrogated Jim Crow laws throughout the South by ratifying the UN Charter. Conservatives reacted by lobbying for a constitutional amendment, known as the Bricker Amendment, to abolish the treaty supremacy rule. The amendment never passed, but Bricker's supporters achieved their goals through de facto constitutional change. Before 1945, the treaty supremacy rule was a mandatory constitutional rule that applied to all treaties. The de facto Bricker Amendment converted the rule into an optional rule that applies only to “self-executing” treaties. Under the modern rule, state governments are allowed to violate national treaty obligations — including international human rights obligations — that are embodied in “non-self-executing” treaties.

Download or read book Constitutional Change and Popular Sovereignty written by Maria Cahill and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-07-15 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection focuses on the particular nexus of popular sovereignty and constitutional change, and the implications of the recent surge in populism for systems where constitutional change is directly decided upon by the people via referendum. It examines different conceptions of sovereignty as expressed in constitutional theory and case law, including an in-depth exploration of the manner in which the concept of popular sovereignty finds expression both in constitutional provisions on referendums and in court decisions concerning referendum processes. While comparative references are made to a number of jurisdictions, the primary focus of the collection is on the experience in Ireland, which has had a lengthy experience of referendums on constitutional change and of legal, political and cultural practices that have emerged in association with these referendums. At a time when populist pressures on constitutional change are to the fore in many countries, this detailed examination of where the Irish experience sits in a comparative context has an important contribution to make to debates in law and political science.

Download or read book National Identity Nationalism and Constitutional Change written by F. Bechhofer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-07-08 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to say you're English, Scottish, British? Does it matter much to people? Has devolution and constitutional change made a difference to national identity? Does the future of the UK depend on whether or not people think they are British? Social and political scientists answer these questions vital to the future of the British state.

Download or read book Constitutional Change in the Contemporary Socialist World written by Ngoc Son Bui and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-24 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, there are only five socialist or communist countries left in the world – China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam – which constitute about one-quarter of the world’s population. Yet, there is little scholarship on their constitutions. These countries have seen varying socioeconomic changes in the decades since 1991, which have led in turn to constitutional changes. This book will investigate, from a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective, how and why the constitutional systems in these five countries have changed in the last three decades. The book then breaks the constitutional changes down into four questions: what are the substantive contents of constitutional change, what are the functions, what are the mechanisms, and what are the driving forces? These questions form a framework to process the changes the five countries have gone through, such as making new constitutions, amending current ones, introducing more rights, allowing citizens to engage in changes, enacting legislation, and defining the constitutional authority of the three state branches and their relationship with the Communist Party. While all five countries have adapted their constitutional systems, the degree, mechanisms, and influential factors are not identical and present considerable variations. This book examines and explores these differences and how they developed. Constitutional Change in the Contemporary Socialist World offers a comprehensive and holistic view of an understudied and overlooked area of constitutional law, essential for anyone studying or working in law, politics, or policy.

Download or read book Constitutional Politics written by Sotirios A. Barber and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2001-12-09 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What does it mean to have a constitution? Scholars and students associated with Walter Murphy at Princeton University have long asked this question in their exploration of constitutional politics and judicial behavior. These scholars, concerned with the making, maintenance, and deliberate change of the Constitution, have made unique and significant contributions to our understanding of American constitutional law by going against the norm of court-centered and litigation-minded research. Beginning in the late 1970s, this new wave of academics explored questions ranging from the nature of creating the U.S. Constitution to the philosophy behind amending it. In this collection, Sotirios A. Barber and Robert P. George bring together fourteen essays by members of this Princeton group--some of the most distinguished scholars in the field. These works consider the meaning of having a constitution, the implications of particular choices in the design of constitutions, and the meaning of judicial supremacy in the interpretation of the Constitution. The overarching ambition of this collection is to awaken a constitutionalist consciousness in its readers--to view themselves as potential makers and changers of constitutions, as opposed to mere subjects of existing arrangements. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Walter F. Murphy, John E. Finn, Christopher L. Eisgruber, James E. Fleming, Jeffrey K. Tulis, Suzette Hemberger, Stephen Macedo, Sanford Levinson, H. N. Hirsch, Wayne D. Moore, Keith E. Whittington, and Mark E. Brandon.