British Constitution

British Constitution

In England there is no one document or fundamental bode of la\\^, that can be described as a " constitution The absence of and such document or of any distinction between public and private law has led to the suggestion (perhaps first made by Alexis de Tocqueville) that there is no constitution in England. Certainy the English constitution has no existence apart from the ordinary law; it is indeed part of that very law. The Magna Carta, the Petition of Right, the Habeas Corpus Act, the Bill of Rights, and the Act of Settlement are the leading enactments; but they- are in no sense a constitutional code; and, without a host of judicial decisions, other statutes of much less importance, and a mass of custom and convention, these statutes would be unworkable

The sources of English constitutional law are statutes, judicial precedent, textbooks, law books, the writings of historians and political theorists, the biographies and autobiographies of statesmen. the minutiae of every type of government record and publication. This is wnat is meant by saving the English constitution is " unwritten": it is not formally enacted; its rules have to be sought out in a dozen fields, not in any one code.

Similarly, it is flexible, and here the contrast is with a rigid constitution. There are no special safeguards for constitutional rules; constitutional law can be changed, amended, or abolished just like any rule of private law; there is no field in which Parliament is forbidden to legislate; there are no fundamental or unalterable ideologies and no procedures to prescribe delay or extra processes for constitutional change.

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