A Conventional Solution to Constitutional Stagnation?

Authors

• David E. Pozen, Columbia Law SchoolFollow

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

9-2026

Abstract

Our charter of government is stuck. The last time the U.S. Constitution was revised was over 30 years ago, when the “fluky” and largely inconsequential Twenty-Seventh Amendment stole into the text two centuries after it was written. The last time Congress proposed an amendment was almost 50 years ago, when the District of Columbia Voting Rights Amendment was sent to its demise at the ratification stage. Although state constitutions remain far more dynamic, they too have experienced a declining rate of amendment in recent years.

Disciplines

Constitutional Law | Law

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

Comments

File includes extracted endnotes (p. 468-469).

Recommended Citation

David E. Pozen, A Conventional Solution to Constitutional Stagnation?, Democracy's Challenges: 100 Ideas, Bob Bauer, Richard Pildes, Rosa Po & Samuel Issacharoff (Eds.), NYU Press (2026).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/faculty_scholarship/4884