1 The Wuthering Heights of Constitutional Amendment: A Portrait of Contemporary Theory and Practice Francisca Pou Giménez # [Draft; Published version: The American Journal of Comparative Law, avaa033, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcl/avaa033] Overview: a Moebius strip Richard Albert is the contemporary scholar that has done more to place constitutional amendment in the global academic spotlight and invite (and actively seek the means to generate) a broad, inclusive and refreshing discussion on their many dimensions. Where before there were only arid philosophical analysis of rules of change and the theory of legal systems, skinny references of constitutional lawyers to particular amendment clauses or episodes, and an emerging body of literature on constitutional longevity and change in whose context the singularity of amendment was not entirely visible, we now have a rich and eye-opening scene. Albert’s recent writings are now gathered in a book: Constitutional Amendments 1 . The book begins with a flexibly constructed introduction and from there advances “backwards”: it goes from products to processes, not from processes to products. Instead of first addressing amendment procedures, describing their possible instantiations and presenting the academic debate on the measurement of amendment difficulty; to then moving to explore its formal (codification) and substantive (amendments, dismemberments) results, raising the debate about their validity, and closing with a more general reflection on the uses of amendment, it proceeds the other way around. This structure has the advantage of maintaining the attention of the reader, who contemplates how the pieces of the puzzle fall progressively into place while being taken away by a sort of Moebius strip dynamics that, when the last page is reached, invites an immediate return to the beginning. The sensation of fluidity is reinforced by the fact some of the sections could have been situated differently, ultimately suggesting that this is merely a selection out of a broader pool of material. 2 The book closes with a blueprint for addressing the process of designing amendment clauses through four different sets of choices. The argument is interspersed with examples from all over the world —although the US and Canada are covered in some # Associate Professor of Constitutional Law, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM, Mexico). I thank Richard Albert, my co-panelists Richard Kay, Mark Kende, Brian Ray, and our chair Ioanna Tourkochoriti for the benefits of an illuminating intellectual debate at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of in Missouri (USA), in October, 2019. 1 Richard Albert, Constitutional Amendments: Making, Breaking and Changing Constitutions (2019). 2 Chapter 3, on measurements of amendment difficulty, contains a section on uncodified changes to amendment rules that—together with Chapter 4, on “varieties of unamendability”— could have been moved to Chapter 5, on the architecture of amendment processes. The normative discussion on “democracy and unamendability” in Chapter 5, for its part, might have been severed from the description of amendment architectures.