The Limits of Amendment Powers

Abstract

The issue of unconstitutional constitutional amendments encompasses several major topics of constitutional law and legal theory, such as the relationship between constituent and constituted powers; the scope and limits of the amending power (or competence), as well as the role of constitutional adjudication in these processes. Yaniv Roznai’s book will certainly foster scholarly debate on constitutional identity and constitutional change, as well as the role of constitutional courts in the enforcement of limits to the amending power. Overall, the text is interesting, well-written and enjoyable for the reader. The reasoning is divided into three main blocks and I will construe my review according to this threefold partition, delving into the topic progressively more in detail, as my expertise concerns, to a greater extent, the jurisprudence regarding constitutional amendments from a comparative perspective. I will draft some remarks on each part of the book and propose general observations on the core concepts and questions. Finally, I will link and contrast Roznai’s arguments to European scholarship on comparative methodology and specifically to my own work concerning constitutional adjudication on constitutional amendments published since 2011. I. The core concept of the book being ‘unamendability’, the author starts the research with the examination of this phenomenon, both theoretically and in practice, from a comprehensive comparative perspective. He adopts a reasoned classification based on explicit, implicit and supra-constitutional limits to the amending power, spanning different jurisdictions and interpretations. First, he analyzes the case of eternity clauses explicitly included in the constitutions