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Constitutions sometimes codify unamendable rules. These unamendable rules are resistant to legal forms of change. They cannot be altered using the codified rules of amendment. Nor can they be repealed. The only properly legal way to change them is to rewrite the constitution. Why do constitutional designers codify these unamendable rules? This chapter explains seven reasons why constitutional designers choose to codify unamendable rules. In explaining these reasons, the chapter discusses many different examples of codified unamendability around the world. This chapter also explains that unamendability can arise in two other forms. First, interpretive unamendability emerges from a judicial decision or an unwritten constitutional norm rooted in the dialogic interactions of political actors. Examples include the basic structure doctrine in India and the substitution of the constitution doctrine in Colombia. Second, constructive unamendability arises as a result of the practical impossibility of gathering the majorities required to amend a rule despite that rule being freely amendable in theory. This chapter illustrates how constructive unamendability occurs and operates with reference to the phenomenon of constitutional veneration, the use of omnibus amendment bills in Canada, the challenge of multi-party incompatibility, and the Equal Suffrage Clause in the U.S. Constitution,. This chapter then connects the three varieties of unamendability to the discussion in Chapter 3 on measuring amendment difficulty. This chapter shows that unamendability further complicates the effort to measure amendment difficulty across jurisdictions and makes it impossible to do so with any reliability. This chapter considers constitutions from around the globe.

Constitutional designers rarely ask many questions they should. How and where will the constitution indicate that it has been amended? Will it record the change at the end of the original constitution, or will the change be inserted directly into the founding text? And what about an uncodified constitution: How will it identify constitution-level changes? This chapter offers the first analysis into the options available to constitutional designers for codifying constitutional amendments. This chapter identifies and illustrates the four major models of amendment codification in the world: the appendative model in the United States, the integrative model in India, the invisible model in Ireland, and the disaggregative model in Great Britain. How and where to memorialize changes to the constitution entails implications for how interpreters of constitutional meaning will read the constitution in the course of adjudication, whether the constitution will become a focal point of reference in constitutional politics, and how intensely citizens will venerate their constitution. The way amendments are recorded is ultimately a choice about how and indeed whether a people chooses to remember its past. Today constitutional designers do not consider the consequences of amendment codification, but they should. This chapter explains why the choices involved in amendment codification concern more than mere aesthetics. This chapter considers constitutions from Canada, Great Britain, India, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, Norway, Saint Lucia, Spain, and the United States.