Conventional Wisdom: The Alternate Article V Mechanism for Proposing Amendments to the U.S. Constitution

Article V of the Constitution allows two-thirds majorities of both houses of Congress to propose amendments to the document and a three-fourths majority of the states to ratify them. Scholars and frustrated advocates of constitutional change have often criticized this process for being too difficult. Despite this, state legislatures have yet to use the other primary method that Article V outlines for proposing amendments: it permits two-thirds of the state legislatures to petition Congress to call a convention to propose amendments that, like those proposed by Congress, must be ratified by three-fourths of the states. In this book, John R. Vile surveys more than two centuries of scholarship on Article V and concludes that the weight of the evidence (including a much-overlooked Federalist essay) indicates that states and Congress have the legal right to limit the scope of such conventions to a single subject and that political considerations would make a runaway convention unlikely. Charting a prudent course between those who fail to differentiate revolutionary change from constitutional change, those who fear ever using the Article V convention mechanism that the Framers clearly envisioned, and those who would vest total control of the convention in Congress, the states, or the convention itself, Vile’s work will enhance modern debates on the subject.

About the Author :
John R. Vile is a professor of political science and dean of the University Honors College at Middle Tennessee State University, USA. He has written extensively on the writing and ratification of the United States Constitution, the constitutional amending process, other proposed alternatives to the U.S. Constitution, and Supreme Court decisions and other contemporary understandings of the Document. His books include The Writing and Ratification of the United States Constitution, The Men Who Made the Constitution, The Constitutional Convention of 1787: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of America's Founding, A Companion to the U.S. Constitution and Its Amendments, The United States Constitution: Questions and Answers, Presidential Winners and Losers: Words of Victory and Concession, Essential Supreme Court Decisions: Summaries of Leading Cases in U.S. Constitutional Law, The Constitutional Amending Process in American Political Thought, Contemporary Questions Surrounding the Constitutional Amending Process, Constitutional Change in the United States, Encyclopedia of Constitutional Amendments, Proposed Amendments and Amending Issues, The Re-Framers: 170 Eccentric, Visionary, and Patriotic Proposals to Rewrite the U.S. Constitution and Describing The Wisest Council in the World: Restoring the Prose Portraits by William Pierce of Georgia of the Delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787. He is also the editor of and a contributor to The Theory and Practice of Constitutional Change in America, Great American Lawyers,Great American Judges; and Proposed Amendments to the U.S. Constitution and the co-editor of the Encyclopedia of the First Amendment, Encyclopedia of the Fourth Amendment, Constitutional Law in Contemporary America and the Encyclopedia of Civil Liberties in America. In addition to writing many articles and reviews, Vile has contributed to numerous books and encyclopedias.

Review :
Vile provides a methodical, expert, and very fair-minded analysis of the process of amending the U.S. Constitution through a state-initiated national convention. . . . This timely, useful book will interest scholars of public and constitutional law as well as those general readers who avidly devour books on the Constitution.--D. B. Robertson "Choice"