scholarly journals Amendment of State Constitutions

1907 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Wilford Garner

The right of the people, acting within the bounds of the law and through organs constituted in conformity with the prescriptions of the existing constitution, to alter, amend, or abolish their form of government whenever they deem it necessary to their safety and happiness is, in effect, declared by practically every American bill of rights to be not only fundamental but inalienable and indefeasible. The phraseology differs in some of them but the substance is the same in all. Without such a right the mistakes and errors of the past could not be eliminated from the body politic nor the accumulated wisdom and experience of other States utilized. Without it, the fundamental maxim that constitutions grow instead of being made would be meaningless and political development impossible. An acute thinker has well observed that no constitution can expect to be permanent unless it guarantees progress as well as order. Political conservatism is a virtue too often trampled upon by statesmen, but it has its limits, and, in its exaggerated form, becomes a source of revolution. The amending power has been aptly compared to a safety valve which ought to be so adjusted as not to discharge its peculiar function with too great facility lest it become an escape pipe for party passion and political prejudice, nor with such difficulty that the force needed to induce action will explode the machine.

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Hélène Landemore

This introductory chapter provides an overview of open democracy. Openness is an umbrella concept for general accessibility of power to ordinary citizens. Whereas representation, especially of the electoral kind, always creates the risk of robbing the people of the right to participate in law-making, an open system guarantees that citizens can make their voices generally heard at any point in time and initiate laws when they are not satisfied with the agenda set by representative authorities. Openness prevents the closure and entrenchment of the divide between the represented and representatives that inevitably accompany representation. It means that power flows through the body politic, as opposed to stagnates with a few people. Indeed, open democracy shares common features with what is commonly known as “participatory democracy” and can be considered a variety of it.


Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-303
Author(s):  
Michael Connors Jackman

This article investigates the ways in which the work of The Body Politic (TBP), the first major lesbian and gay newspaper in Canada, comes to be commemorated in queer publics and how it figures in the memories of those who were involved in producing the paper. In revisiting a critical point in the history of TBP from 1985 when controversy erupted over race and racism within the editorial collective, this discussion considers the role of memory in the reproduction of whiteness and in the rupture of standard narratives about the past. As the controversy continues to haunt contemporary queer activism in Canada, the productive work of memory must be considered an essential aspect of how, when and for what reasons the work of TBP comes to be commemorated. By revisiting the events of 1985 and by sifting through interviews with individuals who contributed to the work of TBP, this article complicates the narrative of TBP as a bluntly racist endeavour whilst questioning the white privilege and racially-charged demands that undergird its commemoration. The work of producing and preserving queer history is a vital means of challenging the intentional and strategic erasure of queer existence, but those who engage in such efforts must remain attentive to the unequal terrain of social relations within which remembering forms its objects.


2021 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 335-340
Author(s):  
Laura Phillips Sawyer

A long-standing, and deeply controversial, question in constitutional law is whether or not the Constitution's protections for “persons” and “people” extend to corporations. Law professor Adam Winkler's We the Corporations chronicles the most important legal battles launched by corporations to “win their constitutional rights,” by which he means both civil rights against discriminatory state action and civil liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution (p. xvii). Today, we think of the former as the right to be free from unequal treatment, often protected by statutory laws, and the latter as liberties that affect the ability to live one's life fully, such as the freedom of religion, speech, or association. The vim in Winkler's argument is that the court blurred this distinction when it applied liberty rights to nonprofit corporations and then, through a series of twentieth-century rulings, corporations were able to advance greater claims to liberty rights. Ultimately, those liberty rights have been employed to strike down significant bipartisan regulations, such as campaign finance laws, which were intended to advance democratic participation in the political process. At its core, this book asks, to what extent do “we the people” rule corporations and to what extent do they rule us?


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 467-472
Author(s):  
Vladimir I. Petlakh ◽  
Vladimir A. Borovitsky ◽  
Alexander K. Konovalov ◽  
Natalya N. Strogova

The number of children swallowing magnetic foreign bodies has been a significantly high for the past decades, increasingly needing endoscopic or surgical interventions. Case report. In our observation, a 12-year-old girl swallowed magnetic balls from childrens designer 10 days prior to hospital admission. Foreign bodies (5 balls) were found during X-ray examination in the projection of the cecum. Conservative therapy carried out for 4 days had no success, thus colonoscopy was performed to remove foreign bodies. Foreign bodies were fixed to the intestinal wall, and attempts to separate them were unsuccessful. When a medical magnet was placed outside the body in the right iliac region, a chain of magnetic balls detached from the intestinal wall and made it possible to be captured in a trap loop and be removed. The girl avoided a laparotomy with an opening of the colon. Conclusion. External use of a medical magnet is effective for navigation and assistance during colonoscopic extraction when magnetic foreign bodies are found in the colon.


Author(s):  
Sabato Morais

This chapter takes a look at a sermon by Sabato Morais. Its structure is fairly straightforward. An introductory section focuses on what may appear to be a relatively minor issue but was apparently one that Morais considered to be of symbolic significance: the wording of the presidential proclamation of the national fast-day (made in response to a request by the Senate, possibly in response to the Southern day of prayer on 27 March). The body of the sermon presents two major themes. The first is introduced by the celebrated verses from the fifty-eighth chapter of the Book of Isaiah in which the prophet, speaking in God's behalf, castigates the people for the insincerity of their observance of a day of fasting and prayer. The chapter then turns to the second major theme: the repudiation of a dishonourable, ignominious peace that would come at the cost of dissolution of the American body politic.


Author(s):  
Michelle Sizemore

This chapter examines two competing forms of sovereign representation against the backdrop of the Whiskey Rebellion. In the new federal republic, George Washington served as a unifying symbol of the people in the centuries-long tradition of the monarch, but the very rituals of Washington’s office and also those of the rebels, such as tar-and-feathering, call attention to the first president’s limitations as symbol of the body politic. Rather than a static substance, the people are a protean force, a circumstance that prompts new forms of representation in Mason Locke Weems’s Life of Washington (1800), Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry (1797), and other works.


Theoria ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 66 (159) ◽  
pp. 23-51
Author(s):  
Richard A. Lee Jr.

In Defensor Pacis Marsilius of Padua grounds the legitimacy of the kingdom, or the state (civitas), on the peace that rule provides the citizens. Looking at Aristotle’s claim that the civitas strives to be like an animal in which all parts in the right proportion for the sake of health, Marsilius argues that ‘the parts of the kingdom or state will be well disposed for the sake of peace [tranquilitas].’ Marsilius goes on to define peace as the agreeable ‘belonging together’ of all members of the kingdom or the state. In this way, Marsilius moves away from a theological ground of the legitimacy of the state towards one that is entirely secular. However, the ground is an unstable one in that it acknowledges the fact that the ‘members’ of the body politic are characterised by difference. As such, the ground of legitimate authority will be characterised as much by force as by peace or by the relation of force to peace.


10.12737/6572 ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 20-33
Author(s):  
Наталья Гаршина ◽  
Natalya Garshina

Having a look at the tourist space as a cultural specialist, the author drew attention to the fact that the closest to the modern man is a city environment he contacts and sometimes encounters in everyday life and on holidays. And every time whether he wants it or not, it opens in a dif erent way. One way of getting to know the world has long been a walking tour. It’s not just a walk hand in hand with a pleasant man or hasty movement to the right place, but namely the tour, in which a knowledgeable person with a soulful voice will speak about the past and present of the city and its surroundings, as if it is about your life and the people close to you. Turning to the beginning of the twentieth century, the experience of scientists-excursion specialists we today can learn a lot to improve the process of building up a tour, and most importantly the transmission of knowledge about the world in which we live. Well-known names of the excursion theory founders to professionals are I. Grevs, N. Antsiferov, N. Geynike and others. They are given in the context of ref ection on the historical development of walking tours, which haven’t lost their value and attract both creators and consumers of tour services.


Daedalus ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 142 (3) ◽  
pp. 228-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina M. Rodríguez

In considering what it means to treat immigration as a “civil rights” matter, I identify two frameworks for analysis. The first, universalistic in nature, emanates from personhood and promises non-citizens the protection of generally applicable laws and an important set of constitutional rights. The second seeks full incorporation for non-citizens into “the people,” a composite that evolves over time through social contestation – a process that can entail enforcement of legal norms but that revolves primarily around political argument. This pursuit of full membership for non-citizens implicates a reciprocal relationship between them and the body politic, and the interests of the polity help determine the contours of non-citizens' membership. Each of these frameworks has been shaped by the legal and political legacies of the civil rights movement itself, but the second formulation reveals how the pursuit of immigrant incorporation cannot be fully explained as a modern-day version of the civil rights struggle.


1919 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 577-592
Author(s):  
Kirk H. Porter

Within recent years there has been a tendency to give more careful attention to the technique of legislation. In the past proposed laws have often been prepared by legislators who knew what they wanted, but were not able to express their wishes in scientifically constructed form. It is desirable of course that representatives of the people should determine legislative policy; and yet it is not counter to any intelligent principle of democracy that the drafting of bills should be done by experts who can put in brief though adequate phrases the essence of what the technically unskilled representative may want. It should be their task to use political machinery intelligently, and to warn the overzealous advocate against using it in a vain attempt to achieve an end which mayhap cannot be secured through political machinery at all. It is right that the people, through democratic channels of popular assemblies, should determine what they want; but it is no less proper that use should be made of those with special training to formulate ways and means.Some states have already established legislative reference bureaus which do the work of bill drafting. The individual legislator goes to the bureau with a general outline of a law he has in mind. The bureau renders expert advice on the subject matter of the bill, if such advice is wanted, and proceeds to draft a measure embracing the subject in hand. The staff connected with the bureau should be prepared to offer advice as to the constitutionality of the proposed law, to cite precedents in other states if such can be found, and to express an opinion as to the probable attitude of the courts when interpreting it. Information should be at hand regarding the experience of other states, or indeed other countries, with similar legislation.


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