On constitutional disobedience

Q & A with Louis Seidman, author of On Constitutional Disobedience Q. What do you think are the greatest flaws with our Constitution? A. The biggest problem with the Constitution is the amendment process outlined in Article V. It is extremely cumbersome. In fact, the American constitution is more difficult to amend than any other national constitution in the world. As a practical matter, it means that under present political circumstances the Constitution is unamendable. This means that we are saddled with a bunch of eighteenth century judgments about twenty-first century problems. Q. What is your proposed process for revising the US Constitution? A. I’m not in favor of revising the Constitution. I am in favor of ignoring it. The basic argument that I make is that the United States is owned by the people presently living in it. We would not want a foreign government or the UN telling us how to run our country, and we should not want people long dead to tell us either. Just as it is wrong for these people to tell us what kind of country we should have, so too it would be wrong for us to dictate to future generations. Q. Where does Constitutional Disobedience fall within the various schools of constitutional thought? (i.e. originalism vs. living constitutionalism) A. Originalism is the view that the constitution should be interpreted according to the o