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This paper offers a critical rereading of the history of judicial review of
constitutional amendments in Turkey.We argue that, contrary to appearances, the claim
to a power of amendment review on the part of the Turkish Constitutional Court does not
fit Ran Hirschl’s model of hegemonic preservation, which aims to explain the genesis of
strong constitutionalism and judicial review as the result of an anti-democratic elite
consensus that tries to leverage the prestige of judicial institutions. Attempts to impose
Hirschl’s model on the constitutional history of the Turkish Republic have been very
popular in the jurisprudential literature on Turkey, but the model offers a misleading and
incomplete diagnosis of what ails Turkish constitutionalism. It is not the supposed
excessive strength of formal constitutionalism and judicial review in Turkey, but rather
the normative weakness of the Turkish Constitution of 1982, that is responsible, at least
in part, for Turkey’s repeated constitutional crises. We therefore suggest an alternative
template for understanding Turkish constitutional history—the theory of sovereignty as
the power to decide on the exception put forward by Carl Schmitt.