- Research Article
- 10.4324/9781315823911-46
- Dec 12, 2018
- Buffalo Law Review
- J Spelt
- Research Article
- 10.4324/9781351201834-9
- Jan 1, 2017
- Buffalo Law Review
- Richard Albert
The difficulty of formal amendment in constitutional democracies has given rise to an increasingly common phenomenon: quasi-constitutional amendments. These are sub-constitutional changes that do not possess the same legal status as a constitutional amendment, that are formally susceptible to statutory repeal or revision, but that may achieve constitutional status over time as a result of their subject-matter. The impetus for a quasi-constitutional amendment is an intent to circumvent onerous rules of formal amendment in order to alter the operation of a set of existing norms in the constitution. Where constitutional actors determine, correctly or not, that the current political landscape would frustrate their plans for a constitutional amendment to entrench new policy preferences, they resort instead to sub-constitutional means whose successful execution requires less or perhaps even no cross-party or inter-institutional coordination. This strategy sometimes results in significant changes that have the functional effect though not the formal result of a constitutional amendment. In this Chapter, I illustrate this phenomenon with reference to the Constitution of Canada, though I stress at the outset that we can observe this phenomenon elsewhere in the world.
- Research Article
29
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- Buffalo law review
- Janet L Dolgin
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3
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- Buffalo law review
- Karen H Rothenberg + 1 more
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- Buffalo law review
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- Buffalo law review
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- Buffalo law review
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