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You could look at how India fixed such a loophole in its constitution based on the common law: This is of interest to any person interested in law, or mathemati

by sn41 8y ago

You could look at how India fixed such a loophole in its constitution based on the common law: This is of interest to any person interested in law, or mathematical logic. The rub of the whole thing is: define something called "the basic nature of the constitution", which is not part of the text of the constitution, and then mandate that no constitutional reform can violate the basic nature of the constitution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesavananda_Bharati_v._State_of_Kerala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kesavananda_Bharati_v._State_o... There is a famous anecdote of Godel's Citizeship test where he claimed to have detected a loophole in the USA constitution whereby you can install a dictatorship through legal constitutional reform. He was famously shushed by Einstein. See the following article, for example (footnote 115 mentions the Indian Constitutional case). http://law.capital.edu/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=32584 http://law.capital.edu/WorkArea/DownloadAsset.aspx?id=32584

mindslight 8y ago
IMHO regarding Gödel's loophole, focusing on unconstrained amending is a red herring. Any set of rules can be superseded by external means, eg revolution. Spelling out a formal procedure to do so strengthens a constitution - the only weakness it adds is a slight moral authority from technically following the procedure being contained in the original document, but if popular opinion is already against the original spirit of the document, that's moot! My belief is that the loophole is more akin to layered complexity creating self-defeating contradictions - analogous to the technique used to to prove his first incompleteness theorem. Essentially, the law is not a consistent-incomplete system, but an inconsistent-complete one that can prove anything! The US Constitution only defines individual rights in terms of prohibitions on the government, it does not qualitatively prescribe them! And this is indeed the totalitarian shape our modern society has taken. When you run down the Bill of Rights, for each right you can see that its basic ethos has been effectively nullified - through requirements mandated by some third party non de jure yet de facto authority. For any right, you still do technically have the option to engage in a very narrow course of behavior that preserves it, but in practice this is irrelevant! And the real travesty is that for every such violation there is a straightforward chain of law that enabled it - handing the mob direct justification for why said violation is purportedly sensible and just!

by sn41 8y ago

mindslight 8y ago

IMHO regarding Gödel's loophole, focusing on unconstrained amending is a red herring. Any set of rules can be superseded by external means, eg revolution. Spelling out a formal procedure to do so strengthens a constitution - the only weakness it adds is a slight moral authority from technically following the procedure being contained in the original document, but if popular opinion is already against the original spirit of the document, that's moot! My belief is that the loophole is more akin to layered complexity creating self-defeating contradictions - analogous to the technique used to to prove his first incompleteness theorem. Essentially, the law is not a consistent-incomplete system, but an inconsistent-complete one that can prove anything! The US Constitution only defines individual rights in terms of prohibitions on the government, it does not qualitatively prescribe them! And this is indeed the totalitarian shape our modern society has taken. When you run down the Bill of Rights, for each right you can see that its basic ethos has been effectively nullified - through requirements mandated by some third party non de jure yet de facto authority. For any right, you still do technically have the option to engage in a very narrow course of behavior that preserves it, but in practice this is irrelevant! And the real travesty is that for every such violation there is a straightforward chain of law that enabled it - handing the mob direct justification for why said violation is purportedly sensible and just!