Three Aspirations
Each of these four lines of inquiry and others apparent in this volume opens a different window into the promise and peril of unamendability. The chapters are written to be in close conversation with each other and with the larger literature on unamendability.
What results is a volume that we hope will become an early point of reference for scholars interested in learning about unamendability in all of its forms and manifestations in constitutional democracies, about whether and how we might defend unamendability both explicit and implicit, and about the possible and proper roles of courts, political actors and citizens when confronted with unamendability either at the stage of designing a constitution or subsequently when it must be interpreted by courts, executed and enforced by political actors and lived by the people.We have three aspirations for this volume. The first is that it will be an accessible introduction to the subject of unamendability for scholars of public law interested in exploring what is to our mind the most interesting pre-commitment device in constitutional law. The second is that advanced scholars of comparative constitutionalism will find the perspectives in these pages challenging and useful to their own understanding of the stakes involved in choosing to entrench unamendability in a constitution, whether formally by design or informally by practice or interpretation. Our third aspiration relates to the construction of constitutions: we hope that constitutional designers will consider the arguments both for and against unamendability presented in this volume, and that if they ultimately opt for unamendability their choice will be the one that best aligns with the history and hopes of the people they represent. There has always been one enduring truth in constitutionalism—a truth in which all constitutions are rooted: the fountain of constitutional legitimacy is the people themselves. Whether unamendability can live up to this highest of ambitions is for constitutional designers to decide.
More on the topic Three Aspirations:
- Three Aspirations
- REFERENCES
- Third-Party Intervention
- JINNAH’S INAUGURAL SPEECH as the President of the Constituent Assembly is considered amongst his most important, one ‘in which he clearly outlined the ideal and concept of Pakistan, its constitutional structure, and the hopes and aspirations of its people’.1
- OVERVIEW: PERSON, PROCESS, AND PRODUCT
- Overview of the New Literature
- Integrative Strategy and Insight
- Abortion methods
- MWA-Based Dialogue (MWA-D: Social Creativity Strategy
- PREPARING THE GROUND FOR EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS