A. The Constitution Defined

• Author: Patrick J. Monahan - Byron Shaw
• Pages: 3-4

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C H A P T E R 1

A country’s constitution is the set of fundamental principles that describe the organizational framework of the state and the nature, scope, and limitations on the exercise of state authority. A constitution may be described as a body of rules about law making: it represents a primary set of rules that defines how the ordinary rules or laws in a society are to be made or changed. A constitution defines the relationship among different kinds of laws by establishing their relative priority and clarifying how conflicts are resolved. In addition, a constitution describes how the primary or constitutional rules themselves can be created or changed.

Defined in this generic way, it can be said that all nation states have constitutions, since all countries have certain organizing principles or rules for the exercise of state authority. However, one important distinguishing feature among constitutions of different countries is the extent to which they attempt to place limits on the exercise of legislative or law-making authority.

A constitution does not have to impose any substantive limits on the legislative power of state institutions. The doctrine of parliamentary supremacy, which lies at the heart of the U.K. constitutional tradition, states that Parliament can make or unmake any law on any subject. Thus, the only historical limit on U.K. legislative authority is the inabil-

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ity of Parliament to bind its successors; that is, one Parliament cannot prevent a later Parliament from amending an existing law.¹

The alternative approach - one that has become increasingly popular around the world in the past fifty years - is to entrench certain substantive limits on the manner in which state power can be exercised. When rules are "constitutionally entrenched," they are set out in a fundamental constitutional...