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The Constitution And The United Kingdom

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A constitution is often defined as a set of rules set to regulate the system of government within a state. Professor King in his Hamlyn Lecture defined the constitution as, “the set of the most important rules that regulate the relations among the different parts of the government of a given country and also the relations between the different parts of the government and the people of the country”. Unlike some other democratic countries, the United Kingdom does not have a single written document entitled “The Constitution” but rather it has what is referred to as an ‘unwritten constitution’.

The UK constitution is made up from a wide variety of sources, some of which are conventions while others are as more official such as laws found in EU law. The constitution can be found in a number of documents such as Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Act of Settlement and the Parliament Acts. A common source of the constitution includes Acts of Parliament, there exists the argument that many of the Acts that are currently on the statute book are constitutional laws, this can be noted in the case Thoburn v City Sunderland (2002) , where Laws LJ makes a distinctions between what he termed as ‘ordinary statutes’ and ‘constitutional statutes’. Similarly decisions of courts can also become a source of legislation, as can the legislative supremacy of parliament, A.V. Dicey, the British jurist and Constitutional theorist, described this as “the power of law-making unrestricted by any

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