Constitutional law is the branch of the public law of a nation or state which treats of the organization, powers and frame of government, the distribution of political and governmental authorities and functions, the funda­mental principles which are to regulate the relations of government and citizen, and which prescribes generally the plan and method according to which the public af­fairs of the nation or state are to be administered.

In modern times by far the most important political community has been the national state. Modern constitu­tional law is the offspring of nationalism as well as of the idea that the state must protect certain fundamental rights of the individual. As national states have multiplied in number, so have constitutions and with them the body of constitutional law.

In the broadest sense a constitution is a body of rules governing the affairs of an organized group. A parliament, a church congregation, a social club, or a trade union may operate under the terms of a formal written document labeled constitution. This does not mean that all of the rules of the organization are in the constitution, for usually there are many other rules such as bylaws and customs. Invariably, by definition, the rules spelled out in the constitution are considered to be basic, in the sense that, until they are modified according to an appropriate procedure, all other rules must conform with them.

Every political community, and thus every national state, has a constitution, at least in the sense that it operates its important institutions according to some fundamental body of rules. In this sense of the term the only conceivable alternative to a constitution is a condition of anarchy. Constitutions may be written or unwritten; they may be complex or simple; they may provide for vastly different patterns of governance. Even if the only rule that matters is the whim of an absolute dictator, that may be said to be the constitution.

The constitution of a political community is therefore composed, in the first place, of the principles determining the agencies to which the task of governing the community is entrusted and their respective powers. The constitution of a political community may contain more, however, than the definition of the authorities endowed with powers to command. It may also include principles that delimit those powers in order to secure against them fundamental rights of persons or groups. In Europe, for example, the authority of political rulers throughout the Middle Ages did not extend to religious matters, which were strictly reserved to the jurisdiction of the church. The powers of political rulers, moreover, were limited by the rights of at least some classes of subjects. Quarrels and fights over the extent of such rights were not infrequent; and they were sometimes settled through solemn, legal “pacts” among the contenders, the prominent example being Magna Carta (1215). In the modern age, even the powers of an absolute monarch such as the king of France were not truly absolute: acting alone, he could not alter the fundamental laws of the kingdom or disestablish the Roman Catholic Church.

The theory of the rights of the individual was a potent factor in reshaping the constitutions of Western states in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. The first step was made by England at the time of the Glorious Revolution (1688). It was in the United States, however, that the theory scored its most complete success. U.S. constitutionalism put in full evidence the character that belongs, in essence, to all constitutional law: the fact of its being “basic” with respect to all other laws of the legal system. This also made it possible to set up institutional controls over the conformity even of legislation with the group of rules considered, within the system, to be of supreme importance.

The American idea of stating in an orderly, comprehensive document the essentials of the rules that must guide the operations of government became popular very quickly. Since the end of the 18th century scores of states, in Europe and elsewhere, have followed the United States’ example. Today, almost all states have constitutional documents describing the fundamental organs of the state, the ways they should operate, and, usually, the rights they must respect and even sometimes the goals they ought to pursue.

TASKS

Task 1. Find the words with the similar meaning among the following:

sense, power, basic, nation, matter, community, fundamental, authority, affair, method, offspring, way, purpose, body, state, society, result, meaning, aim, important, set, organization, century, law, goal, age, agency, significant, rule.

Task 2. Find the words with the opposite meaning among the following:

public, written, fundamental, to include, to establish, theory, legal, success, to disestablish, private, secondary, complex, rare, unwritten, religious, simple, failure, to exclude, secular, frequent, practice, illegal.