Blog of the International Journal of Constitutional Law

New Scholarship Review: Interview with Jonathan Marshfield on Federalism and the Amendment Power

Richard Albert, Boston College Law School

In this installment of I-CONnect’s interview series, I speak with Jonathan Marshfield about his forthcoming paper on Decentralizing the Amendment Power. In his new paper, Marshfield explores how and why constitutional amendment rules might be structured to include subnational units in the process of formal amendment. He concludes that “although there are real risks associated with strong decentralization of the amendment power, there are several sound normative justifications for including subnational units in the amendment process.”

In our interview, we discuss how federalism exacerbates amendment difficulty, why constitutional designers might or might not want to include subnational units in the amendment process, and how to categorize the variations on subnational involvement in formal amendment.

The full interview is available here.

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