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No Amendment? No Problem: Judges, “Informal Amendment,” And The Evolution Of Constitutional Meaning In The Federal Democracies Of Australia, Canada, India, And The United States, John V. Orth, John Gava, Arvind P. Bhanu, Paul T. Babie
No Amendment? No Problem: Judges, “Informal Amendment,” And The Evolution Of Constitutional Meaning In The Federal Democracies Of Australia, Canada, India, And The United States, John V. Orth, John Gava, Arvind P. Bhanu, Paul T. Babie
Pepperdine Law Review
This article considers the way in which judges play a significant role in developing the meaning of a constitution through the exercise of interpretive choices that have the effect of “informally amending” the text. We demonstrate this by examining four written federal democratic constitutions: those of the United States, the first written federal democratic constitution; India, the federal constitution of the largest democracy on earth; and the constitutions of Canada and Australia, both federal and democratic, but emerging from the English unwritten tradition. We divide our consideration of these constitutions into two ideal types, identified by Bruce Ackerman: the “revolutionary” …
Comparing Literary And Biblical Hermeneutics To Constitutional And Statutory Interpretation, Robert J. Pushaw Jr.
Comparing Literary And Biblical Hermeneutics To Constitutional And Statutory Interpretation, Robert J. Pushaw Jr.
Pepperdine Law Review
Interpreters determine the meaning of language. To interpret literary and biblical texts, scholars have developed detailed rules, methods, and theories of human understanding. This branch of knowledge, “hermeneutics,” features three basic approaches. First, “textualists” treat words as directly conveying their ordinary meaning to a competent reader today. Second, “contextualists” maintain that verbal meaning depends on generally shared linguistic conventions in the particular historical and cultural environment of the author—and that therefore translations or commentaries are necessary to make the writing intelligible to a modern reader. Third, “hermeneutic circle” scholars argue that texts have no objective meaning. Rather, a person’s subjective …