Australia’s Constitution After Whitlam, by Brendan Lim, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), xxiii + 300pp., hardback, £85, ISBN: 9781107119468

Dr Brendan Lim offers an innovative and commanding account of the modern Australian constitution in this book. Lim synthesises insights on legal principle and diligent archival work to render a tour de force on Australian constitutional law. The focus of the book is the outworking of rival ideas of informal processes of constitutional change in the years 1972–1999. Lim tells a much-neglected story of competing conceptions of the “the people” in the Australian constitutional tradition and how, in turn, this concept effects our means of legitimating constitutional change. As such, the book’s aim is to draw out the lessons that we can take from a number of distinct episodes of constitutional transformation.