Jill Lepore

The word amendment just keeps taking on all these adjectives.

So legal scholars like to talk about formal Article 5 amendments.

And a formal Article 5 amendment is a constitutional amendment that is properly adopted and ratified into the U.S.

Constitution through the methods that are described in Article 5.

But because an amendment just really means a change or a revision or a correction or a repair,

And because the Constitution is changing and being corrected, repaired, and altered all the time, amendment happens in other ways.

And so then legal scholars come up with other adjectives to describe other kinds of amending the Constitution.

Informal amendment is a common way of describing a kind of creeping change that comes about

Almost by habit or practice.

And then there are amendments that are often described as de facto amendments that are really judicial decisions that have the consequence of changing how we understand a provision of the Constitution.

We could make more piles than that.

I would say those might be the three main ones.

Yeah.

So no matter what you're.

political preferences, people don't like to admit that the Supreme Court is actually often amending the Constitution.

In my observation, you may have a different view of this because technically the Supreme Court's not supposed to be amending the Constitution.

So there's a kind of nudge, nudge, wink, wink when the Supreme Court says, oh, there is such a thing as presidential immunity.

In my mind, that's an amendment to the Constitution.

That's not in the Constitution.

They have invented and devised that.