Abstract
In Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendments, Yaniv Roznai seeks to unscramble the apparent contradictions in the idea of an unconstitutional constitutional amendment. This argument is ambitious in its scope and its global comparative reach. Roznai does not limit himself to justifying explicit limitations placed on the power of amendment nor to limitations that go only to process. Rather, Roznai argues that amendment powers are always subject to limitations of substance and procedure and that these limitations may be implicit as well as explicit. In this short essay, I will argue that the form of argument deployed by Roznai cannot fully justify the doctrine of unamendability as Roznai elaborates upon it. It allows Roznai to establish that unamendability is a conceptual possibility but it does not follow, as he seeks to argue, that unamendability is a necessary consequence of constitutionalism.
Thanks are due to Rosalind Dixon, William Partlett Cheryl Saunders and Lael K. Weis for their extremely insightful comments on a draft. It benefitted also from discussion of these ideas with the Reading Group of the Laureate Program in Comparative Constitutional Law at Melbourne Law School and at the Faculty of Law at the University of Queensland
Acknowledgements
Support for this research was provided by the Australian Research Council through the Laureate Program in Comparative Constitutional Law at Melbourne Law School.
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
