What is a constitution? Does the UK have one?

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What is a constitution? Does the UK have one?

The debate surrounding the definition of constitutions is one which has become increasingly eminent over recent decades, with the apparent disparities between various constitutions in the international community. S.E. Finer defines a constitution as, “a code of rules which aspire to regulate the allocation of functions, powers and duties among the various agencies and offices of government, and defines the relationships between these and the public.” Definitions vary, however, amongst political theorists and legal experts, with many adding to or detracting from the aforementioned definition. The reason for this can be attributed to the etymology of the word ‘constitution’.

The word ‘constitution’ is derived from the Latin term constitutio, with constitutiones as its plural form, which was used to describe an edict, enactment or Imperial decree in ancient Rome. Giovanni Sartori argues that this word became a “vacant term” in English, and thus the contemporary use of it is highly unrelated to the original term. G. Maddox, however, points out that Sartori failed to consider how the word constitutio itself acquired its meaning. Maddox asserts that the word “derives originally from constituere, ‘to set up, establish, erect, construct, arrange, to settle and determine’”, and as such constitutio becomes a ‘regulation’, a decree which works to limit state power. This is thus essentially linked to the existing use of the word in that the basic function, purpose or telos of the constitution, is commonly regarded to be the limitation of government power.

Even Finer’s aforesaid definition of constitutions shows that constitutions act to limit power, as the ‘allocation of functions, powers and duties’ is argued by Vernon Bogdanor to also mean “ipso facto, to limit powers.” Thus, an important aspect of defining a constitution would be to include its basic purpose of limiting government power. Bogdanor further points out, however, that when the Founding Fathers developed the American constitution, they had not one but two aims. These aims included the structuring of government which would serve to limit government power, thus protecting the people from tyranny, as well as protecting the people from themselves. This is reminiscent of the Hobbesian idea of ‘bellum omnium contra omnes’ which expressed that man needed to come to a ‘social contract’ to counter the ‘war of all against all’ in the state of nature, and thus the constitution can be likened to a social contract, aimed at protecting the people from the government’s arbitrary exercise of power as well as themselves.

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The modern constitution is usually classified either as a codified constitution, sometimes denoted as ‘written’, or as an uncodified constitution, commonly called ‘unwritten’. A codified constitution, found in most democracies, such as the United States of America and France, can be defined as one in which key aspects of the constitution are written and compiled into a cohesive whole and single unit or document. The less popular of the two forms, the uncodified constitution, is found in only three democracies in the world, that of the UK, Israel and New Zealand. In this system, the key aspects of the constitution ...

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