People’s Will before Judicial Review of (Un)Constitutional Amendments

In modern time, constitutions usually contain rules about constitutional amendments, and in certain circumstances, “we, the people” are called to propose and/or approve any constitutional change. There is an uneasy relationship between substantive limits on amendments and democracy because, as demonstrated, democratic constitutions undermine people involvement in the constitutional amendment processes. The paper aims to analyse the role of the people in the constitution-making or constitution-amendment processes. On the one side, it seeks to answer whether the constitutional procedures enable people to entrench good or bad constitutional changes, as well as the features of unamendability clauses, which limit the people participation in those processes. On the other side, the paper considers the serious constitutional law problem behind the judicial review of constitutional amendments when (or better, if) the people have the last word in such processes.