Focus & Scope

The Journal of Constitutional Change (JCC) publishes original scholarship on the making, amendment, replacement, reinterpretation, erosion and defence of constitutions. It treats constitutional change as a distinct field of inquiry rather than as a sub-topic of general constitutional law.

Aims

  1. To build a systematic, cumulative and comparative body of knowledge on formal and informal constitutional change.
  2. To bring the experience of Asia and the Global South into a theory of constitutional change that has been written largely from European and North American cases.
  3. To connect doctrinal analysis with historical, political-science, sociological and empirical approaches to constitutional transformation.
  4. To give a dispersed scholarly conversation a permanent venue, and to make the work of scholars outside the traditional centres of the discipline visible, citable and durable.

Focus

The Journal is comparative in method and global in ambition, with a deliberate emphasis on Asia, Southeast Asia and the wider Global South as sites from which to theorise. Single-jurisdiction studies are welcome provided they engage explicitly with comparative or theoretical debates; the Journal does not publish descriptive national surveys that could have been written without reference to any literature beyond their own borders.

JCC is independent of any court, legislature or government and welcomes work that is critical of the institutions it studies. It publishes doctrinal, theoretical, historical, socio-legal and quantitative scholarship on equal terms, and it does not privilege any single methodology.

Scope

The Journal welcomes manuscripts on, among other subjects:

  • Formal amendment. Amendment procedures and rules; constitutional rigidity and flexibility; referendums, supermajorities and ratification thresholds; amendment rates and amendment culture; the drafting and negotiation of amendments.
  • Limits on change. Unamendability and eternity clauses; basic-structure and implied-limits doctrines; the judicial review of constitutional amendments; the theory and practice of constitutional entrenchment.
  • Constitution-making. Constituent power; constitutional replacement; transitional and post-conflict constitution-making; participatory, deliberative and digital processes; the role of international and regional actors.
  • Informal change. Change through judicial interpretation; constitutional conventions and practice; organic and constitutional statutes; desuetude; constitutional dismemberment and the boundary between amendment and replacement.
  • Erosion and resilience. Abusive and authoritarian constitutionalism; democratic backsliding and constitutional retrogression; militant constitutionalism and democratic self-defence; the design of resilient constitutions; constitutional restoration after autocratic rule.
  • Constitutional identity. The uses and abuses of constitutional identity by courts, executives and movements; the identification of a constitution's unamendable core; identity claims in supranational and plural legal orders.
  • Courts and change. Constitutional and supreme courts as agents, guardians, obstacles and targets of constitutional change; judicial appointments and court reform; court-packing and court-curbing; judicial responses to amendment; compliance with and resistance to constitutional rulings.
  • Multilevel and asymmetric change. Sub-national constitutions; federal, devolved and decentralised orders; special and asymmetric autonomy; secession and self-determination claims; constitutional change in divided societies.
  • Plural, religious and post-colonial orders. Constitutional change in plural legal systems; Islamic and other religious constitutionalism; customary and indigenous law in constitutional transformation; the constitutional legacies of colonial rule.
  • Transnational drivers. International and regional law as a driver or constraint on constitutional change; regional organisations; judicial dialogue; the migration, borrowing and abusive borrowing of constitutional ideas.
  • Methods and theory. Empirical and quantitative studies of constitutional change; constitutional history; normative theories of constituent power, entrenchment and constitutional time.