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British Constitution

In England there is no one document or fundamental body of law that can I described as a "constitution". The absence of any such document or of any distinction between public and private law has led to the suggestion (perhaps first made by Alex de Tocqueville) that there is no constitution in England. Certainly 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 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 columns of every serious newspaper, the minutiae of every type of government record and publication. This is what is meant bysaying 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 process for constitutional change.