ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the political experience of Iceland and its failure. The Constitutional Council, thus, possessed a kind of inherent haziness in terms of its role and function. The people, more precisely the citizen-voters, thus do not write the constitution, which is largely prepared by legal experts and decided by political actors. The Icelandic constitution of 1944 was ratified by Parliament after a popular referendum that approved the choice for the republican form of government and the end of the Act of Union of 1918 with the Kingdom of Denmark. People realize that a liberal-democratic constitution is based not on the popular authorship of the text, but actually on the legal principle of equality. In the Icelandic experience, the weak popular authorization was eventually replaced by an even weaker parliamentary authorization/appointment. Contingencies and circumstances are always different in different historical situations, and only a robust statistical sample might, perhaps, tell what to expect in similar circumstances.
