Law Commons^™

This is the United States report submitted for the session on Formal and Informal Constitutional Amendment at the Twentieth Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law to be held in Fukuoka, Japan in July, 2018. The report reviews the rules of Article V of the United States Constitution that sets out the rules for constitutional amendment and it provides a brief chronology of the twenty-eight amendments adopted to date. It notes a number of potential problems of interpretation associated with Article V. The report considers the widely held assumption that the United States Constitution is one of the hardest, …

An important question for our time concerns whether the Constitution could establish a right to engage in certain marijuana-related activities. Several states have now legalized cannabis, within strict limits, for recreational purposes, and that number will grow. Yet, some states will not promptly legalize but, instead, continue to criminalize, or only “decriminalize” in minor ways, and the federal criminalization statutes also will likely survive for a time. There currently is no recognized right under the Constitution to possess, use, cultivate or distribute cannabis for recreational purposes, even in small amounts, and traditional, single-clause arguments for such a right are weak. …