Getting to a Citizens’ Constitutional Convention: Legal Questions (Without Answers) Concerning the People’s Ability to Reform California’s Government Through a Constitutional Convention

In 2009 and 2010, a reform organization named Repair California worked to place on the November 2010 general election ballot a pair of propositions that would have called for a citizens’ constitutional convention to substantially revise the California Constitution. The movement for reform eventually dissipated, and the propositions did not make it to the 2010 ballot. However, the call for a citizens’ convention presented novel legal questions, including whether voters could call for a convention at all, whether a convention could be called in a single election by two complementary ballot measures, whether delegates could be selected rather than elected, and whether voters could limit the scope of the convention to prevent ancillary issues from sidetracking the structural issues Repair California had hoped to address. This Article briefly surveys these and other questions raised by the call for a citizens’ convention and discusses how proposition drafters hoped to resolve them