Document Type

Review

Publication Date

2014

Abstract

Bruce Ackerman long ago persuaded me that Article V has not been the only route—or even the normal route—to legitimate constitutional change. Volume 3 admirably adds nuance to Ackerman’s account of what happens instead. But nuance can be a vice of a theory as well as a virtue, depending on whether the goal is to understand a phenomenon in its complexity or to provide an actionable program for the future. We The People aims to do both: it is, after all, a grand project, probably the most important in constitutional thought in the last thirty years. But in spite of its ambitions, Volume 3 may have helped persuade me to take Article V more seriously—not as a matter of exclusive constitutional authority for official decisionmakers, but as a matter of prudence for the agents of constitutional change.

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