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Why Write? The Desuetude Of Article V And The Democratic Costs Of Informal Constitutional Amendment, Andrea Scoseria Katz

Scholarship@WashULaw

In his classic Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, the great British constitutional scholar, Albert Venn Dicey likened the constitutional amendment power of the United States to a “a monarch who slumbers and sleeps.”1 It was during periods of constitutional amendment, Dicey explained, writing in 1897, that the full sovereign power of the nation came together out of the disparate fifty states, but these moments were few and far between.