“We, the People” entitlement within constitutional change

• Autor(a) principal: Rodean, Neliana
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34632/catolicalawreview.2019.9109

In recent years, scholars have produced literature on constitutional amendments, in particular on the analysis of the unamendability phenomenon and its relationship with democracy, abusive and populist constitutionalism. The study of constitutional design is of interest, in large part, because a constitution can be amended and such processes make room for the fundamental questions about constitutional order legitimacy, the holder and the locus of sovereignty, especially in those legal orders where a popular legitimated process of altering the constitution is entrenched. Indeed, in some legal orders “We, the People” are called to initiate and/or approve any constitutional change. In this view, the paper brings the reader alongside the “We, the People” claim, stressing, though in restrictive manner, who “the people” are, how they act and react, and when their actions unveil a(n) (un)constitutional change, in order to draw citizen-led constitutional changes grounded on three keywords – populism, (un)constitutional amendments and constitutionalism. The paper is an invitation to the development of “the people” approaches in a constitutional framework that struck populism as democracy’s sentinel.