Constitutional Convention Essay

1523 Words7 Pages
Q1 “ For rules of such importance to be ill-defined, uncertain in application and not enforceable by courts is at best anomalous and at a worst a threat to the principle of government according to law”- Hilaire Barnett- Could it be argued that constitutional conventions would only be effective in regulating political behaviour if they were codified in legal form? From the question clearly stated by Hilaire Barnett that convention has a vague impression and she is urging for codifying the conventions in UK. Whether codifying or not the convention it has been long debating and there are many factors and potential consequence need to be considered when approaching to the conventions issues , these matters will be discuss in this paper. As by first of starting point we need to comprehend the nature of constitution of UK, Constitutional conventions form the most important non legal source which supplement the legal rules of the constitution. Unlike other nations, UK does not have a written constitution (codified constitution), for example United State has a codified constitution which can always referred to their constitution, and therefore the sources like Magna Carta 1215, the Bill of Right 1688 and etc are essentially important in UK. Constitutional Convention is a set of rules and practices that define the relationship and power of those institutions of state. Due to the absence of codified constitution in UK this leads to the difficulties in identifying the constitutional sources. There are two main sources made up of the UK constitution: legal sources (statues, judicial decision and prerogative power) are the principal source and the non legal sources (convention) which primarily relates to the political rules of behaviour. To investigate the proposition there is no clear definition what amounts to a convention. According to A.V Dicey defined as “Conventions,
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