The Politics of Constitutional Reform in North America

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In October 1999, fifteen academic experts and government practitioners from Germany and North America convened at the University of Augsburg to discuss "Constitutional Reform and Constitutional Jurisprudence in Canada and the United States." This volume captures the outcomes of that conference, a collaborative effort between the Department of Political Science at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and the Institute for Canadian Studies at the University of Augsburg. The workshop was guided by two main ideas: first, established democracies must regularly adapt their constitutional frameworks to environmental changes to prevent democratic stability from becoming rigid. In many Western nations, including Canada and the United States, challenges such as the crisis of the Keynesian welfare state and the rise of diverse, postmodern societies have led to increased, albeit often unsuccessful, constitutional reform efforts. Second, there is no singular path or model for achieving an "optimal" constitutional order; reform processes and their outcomes are heavily influenced by specific contexts and historical trajectories. Consequently, workshop participants and contributors to this volume examined the unique preconditions, contexts, and impacts of recent constitutional reform activities in both the United States and Canada.