Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-x5gtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-19T19:28:22.562Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

7 - The Drive for a National Popular Vote for the Presidency: A Case Study in Amending the Unwritten Constitution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2022

Richard Albert
Affiliation:
University of Texas, Austin
Ryan C. Williams
Affiliation:
Boston College, Massachusetts
Yaniv Roznai
Affiliation:
Harry Radzyner School of Law, Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya
Get access

Summary

For present purposes, I take “America’s Unwritten Constitution” to refer (at least in some measure) to the norms, conventions, and practices that have developed in America to give meaning to, and fill in the gaps of, the constitutional text that was penned in 1787, ratified by a requisite number of states shortly thereafter, and formally amended by the Bill of Rights in 1791 and seventeen times during the two-and-a-quarter centuries since. One important constraint on the nation’s Unwritten Constitution is that is must, at some acceptable level, accommodate itself to the written document. A related feature of the Unwritten Constitution is that, as with the formal text, abiding aspects of the unwritten version need to be anchored in some kind of political foundation. These two features of the Unwritten Constitution – a fidelity to the document itself and a grounding in democratic processes – can be helpfully appreciated by examining another crucial component of today’s Unwritten Constitution, and one as to which federal courts have generally been much less central in determining the meaning and operation of the written Constitution’s provisions: the way we select Presidents in America.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×