“AT last he beat his music out./ There lives more faith in honest doubt./ Believe me, than in half the creeds,” wrote Alfred Lord Tennyson in his famous elegy In Memoriam. The 27th Amendment runs a dagger through the Constitution, and many lawyers, like myself, who have no political affiliation, doubt its benevolence.

The constitution of a country is its “highest positive norm” explains Hans Kelsen in General Theory of Law and State, and derives its normativity from a hypothetical ‘Grundnorm’, which is posited above it. The entire function of the Grundnorm, writes Kelsen, “is to confer law-creating power on the acts of the first legislator and on all the other acts based on the first act”.

Kelsen elaborates on the ‘doctrine of revolutionary legality’ in Pure Theory of Law. “The norms of a legal order are valid until their validity is terminated according to the rules of this legal order”, he belabours. A legal revolution is said to occur when “the valid constitution has been changed or replaced in a manner not prescribed by the constitution valid until then”.

Those supporting the amendment argue that since the amendments have been passed in accordance with Articles 238 and 239 of the Constitution, and the requisite two-thirds........

© Dawn