An Embarrassing Constitutional Amendment: An Analysis Of American National Prohibition

Constitutionalism is recognized by many countries in the world as the favorable mode to build the political system. Besides stipulating the basic political structure, the Constitution in these countries not only takes the responsibility of regulating the relationship of individual and government, but also plays the role in rationalizing other statutes. America is the first country in the world to have the written Constitution. Keeping the norm of the Constitution while elastically adapting to modern time by amendments is what considered to be one of the pivotal factors for Americans to have the comparatively stability in their social structure. The research on the Eighteenth Amendment, the only one being repealed in American judicial history, might have some value when the Constitution is to take the amendment in.My thesis starts from the retrospect on the idea of popular sovereignty and social contract as the fountain idea, and further analyzes fundamental spirit and its norm reflected in American Constitution which has been regarded as what the Amendments should cling to. My research on the Eighteenth Amendment, from its ratification to the repeal, works mainly in the discourse of Constitutionalism in which the fundamental ethos of the 1789 edition is the decisive principle for any revision. In response to the changing society, the amendments should not betray its original design and take the uniformed moral concept as the starting point. In the form of being consented by two-thirds majority in the Congress, the Constitutional amendments should not be the suppression over the people of the minority. The violation of the fundamental spirit of the Constitution would finally impair the authoritative status of the Constitution as the supreme law and cause its void in reality.This thesis is divided into four chapters.