University at Buffalo School of Law Digital Commons @ University at Buffalo School of Law Journal Articles Faculty Scholarship 2016 Practice-Driven Changes to Constitutional Structures of Governance James A. Gardner University at Buffalo School of Law Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/journal_articles Part of the Constitutional Law Commons, and the State and Local Government Law Commons Recommended Citation James A. Gardner, Practice-Driven Changes to Constitutional Structures of Governance, 69 Ark. L. Rev. 335 (2016). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/journal_articles/211 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty Scholarship at Digital Commons @ University at Buffalo School of Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal Articles by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ University at Buffalo School of Law. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Practice-Driven Changes to Constitutional Structures of Governance James A. Gardner- Among the methods of informal constitutional change, perhaps the least studied or understood is change resulting from alterations in the way governance is practiced. Such change, typically initiated by political actors in the executive and legislative branches, is probably the most common kind of constitutional change, and is almost certainly the most common source of informal change to structuralprovisions. In the United States, the best known instances of practice-driven changes to constitutional structure come from the federal level-the rise of a formal party system, for example, or the dramatic twentieth-century expansion of presidentialpower. Yet by far the most copious and dramatic examples of such change in the United States are to be found at the subnational level, in changes wrought by practice to the structural provisions of state constitutions.