A Written Constitution

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A Written Constitution

A written constitution is a formal document that defines the nature of

constitutional agreements; theses include rules that govern the

political system and the rights of citizens and governments in a

codified form.

The UK's constitution is unwritten as it hails from no single written

document, but derives from a number of sources that can be said to be

written and part unwritten, examples of this include conventions,

works of authority, Acts of Parliament, EU law and common law.

In many countries, for example, the USA, the legislature is limited by

the Constitution in the laws it can or cannot make. The U.S. Supreme

Court can declare laws passed by the legislature to be

unconstitutional and therefore invalid. The traditional view in the UK

is that Parliament is not subject to any legal limitation and that the

UK courts have no power to declare laws duly passed by Parliament

invalid. According to A.V. Dicey (Law of the Constitution, 1885), "In

theory Parliament has total power. It is sovereign. The concept of

parliamentary sovereignty means that Parliament is the supreme legal

authority in the UK. This contrasts to many European and Commonwealth

countries, which have a clearly defined constitutional settlement.

The closest thing the UK has to a bill of rights today is the Human

Rights Act 1998, which incorporates the European Convention of Human

Rights 1950 (ECHR) into domestic law. The key features within the

unwritten constitution would be described as being uncodified, not

ingrained therefore flexible and unitary (excluding recent devolution)

With that said, the UK, ...

... middle of paper ...

...ion. This would become a problem for a number of reasons:

Judges are unrepresentative of the public; as such they are unlikely

to represent minority groups or activists. Judges are unaccountable

and do not have to answer to Parliament or the public and since they

are not elected is would not be reasonable that they would be able to

overrule an elected Parliament. As such, the core controversy around

the notion of a written constitution has been its potential to act as

a brake on the democratic supremacy of Parliament. Some believe that

the notion of an unelected judicial branch questioning the sovereignty

of Parliament is fundamentally opposed to the notion of representative

democracy. This alone would suggest that the current system provides

strong and effective government with accountability and supreme

authority.

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