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If there is a global constitutional order, it is “unwritten”. We cannot point to a written constitution for global law. Rather, theories of global constitutionalism and processes of global constitutionalisation are derived from an amalgamation of sources across international law and domestic constitutional orders. This blog post reflects on these tensions within the debate on global constitutionalisation, and focuses specifically on democracy as an unwritten constitutional norm in global constitutionalism.

Brazilian constitutional law is profoundly marked by the ideal of codification. In this context, the ‘unwrittenness’ of certain constitutional problems is usually not treated as such. This is especially intensified through the size and textual openness of the Brazilian Constitution. Yet unwritten constitutional normativity plays (and can play) arguably a decisive role in Brazilian constitutionalism. Could one then articulate unwritten constitutional law as a Brazilian constitutional category?

Unwritten constitutional principles pose a number of interesting puzzles, some of which are unique to their unwritten status, some of which are shared with all principles, unwritten and written, legal and non-legal. Using examples from the Canadian constitutional system, this blog post examines what principles are before going on to consider how they work. Its observations are intended to be of general, cross-jurisdictional relevance.

Focussing on “writtenness” can sharpen our sensibility of how liberally the German legal system allows the Federal Constitutional Court, as well as other courts, to acknowledge legal norms or principles whose textual basis in the Grundgesetz is far from obvious – which in other jurisdictions might be put into the area of norm-free, principle-oriented argumentation, i.e. whose constitutional quality is being problematized.

Canada's Constitution sits somewhere between the paradigms of a fully codified written and partially codified unwritten constitutional order. This blog post explains why the differentiation between the written and unwritten matters for our understanding of Canada's constitutional system with a view to terminological, institutional, proceduaral, and policial questions.

Although it seems that the written document of the constitution regulates and controls the existing constitutional order in the written constitution countries, the reality is that "politics in progress" and existing political transactions are not only not fully under the control of the written document of the constitution, but even in some cases, politics has prevailed over rights and determines the way and direction of the implementation of legal norms. As a result, focusing on the form and format of the Constitution should not prevent the examination of the content and political realities in society. The present article, with a descriptive-analytical method and by studying the opinions of the Guardian Council and other available sources, seeks to answer the question that, does Iran's constitutional law function fully according to the written constitution? This study also tries to discover more about the legal or political nature of the basic order in Iran. The result of the research indicates that in Iran’s system of constitutional rights, unwritten and interpretable components link the written text of the constitution with some unwritten areas. On credit, Iran’s constitution is neither completely legal nor completely political, and has both written and unwritten aspects, and the opinions of the Guardian Council are a window to understand them.

There have been several important formal changes to the United Kingdom's constitution over the past few decades, including devolution to Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales; the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights in domestic law; and the creation of a new Supreme Court. This article is about the informal semantic changes that may have accompanied these formal changes. It focuses on several central concepts: parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law, the separation of powers, devolution, and human rights. Using a recently developed machine learning method to analyse a massive corpus of parliamentary debate, the article gauges the extent to which these concepts have become more (or less) related to the meaning of the UK's constitution in parliamentary discourse. Ultimately, the analysis supports some important theoretical expectations about the changing nature of the constitution, including the claim that parliamentary sovereignty is now a less significant concept for the meaning of the constitution than it once was. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of A&C - Administrative & Constitutional Law Review - Revista de Direito Administrativo e Constitucional is the property of A&C - Revista de Direito Administrativo & Constitucional (Instituto Bacellar) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Studii de Ştiintă şi Cultură is the property of Studii de Stiinta si Cultura and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article addresses the question of possible constitutional reform, specifically in the New Zealand context, but also more generally. In any process of constitutional reform, an understanding of how the existing system works and how it came into being is important. It is also important to ask just what is meant by national identity, and how far this can be reflected in the existing system of government. This should be addressed before any detailed consideration of parts of the governmental structure, and then be permitted to inform the discourse and influence the development of proposals for change. Public opinion is of paramount importance, and indeed it may be questioned whether significant constitutional reform proposed by politicians rather than resulting from popular demand has legitimacy; but public opinion and direct or representative democracy alone is not necessarily sufficient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Criticizing the formalism in China’s constitutional studies over the past 30 years and following an empirical-historical perspective to deal with the dilemma of representation and practice, the author argues that both a written constitution and an unwritten constitution are basic features of any constitutional system, and China’s constitutional order can only be understood if China’s unwritten constitution is taken into account. Selecting four important constitutional issues (the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and the National People’s Congress; the position of state chairman and the trinity system of rule; the relationship between the center and localities; and the constitutional structure of “one country two systems”), the author explores four sources of China’s unwritten constitution—the party’s constitution, constitutional conventions, constitutional doctrine, and constitutional statutes—and calls for taking into account China’s unique political tradition and reality to enrich current constitutional scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The question - ought Britain to have a written, more properly, a codified constitution - is perhaps wrongly put. The real question ought to be - why should Britain not have such a constitution... She is, after all, one of just three democracies without one. There are two reasons why Britain has lacked a constitution. The first is that, historically, Britain never had a constitutional moment; the second is the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. Today, however, Britain finds herself engaged in the process of gradually converting an uncodified constitution into a codified one. There is undoubtedly a case in principle for enacting a constitution, but perhaps it ought to wait until the process is completed. There is, moreover, a tension between two types of codified constitution - a lawyer's constitution which would be long and highly detailed, and a people's constitution which would be short, but, inevitably, broadly-worded, and therefore open to interpretation by the courts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been several important formal changes to the United Kingdom's constitution over the past few decades, including devolution to Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales; the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights in domestic law; and the creation of a new Supreme Court. This article is about the informal semantic changes that may have accompanied these formal changes. It focuses on several central concepts: parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law, the separation of powers, devolution, and human rights. Using a recently developed machine learning method to analyse a massive corpus of parliamentary debate, the article gauges the extent to which these concepts have become more (or less) related to the meaning of the UK's constitution in parliamentary discourse. Ultimately, the analysis supports some important theoretical expectations about the changing nature of the constitution, including the claim that parliamentary sovereignty is now a less significant concept for the meaning of the constitution than it once was., (© The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press.)