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Unit 6: Socio-Economic Bases and Salient Features of the Constitutions

• “Constitutionalism, then, governs two separate but related types of relationship. First, There Notes
is” the relationship of government with citizens. -Second, there is the relationship of one
governmental authority to another, the dichotomy is not sharp, for the latter type of
relationship is regulated largely as a means of increasing the effectiveness of the control
imposed on the former type.”
• The Parliament Act of 1911 crippled the powers of House of Lords and its amendment in
1949 further reduced the area of authority of the House in matters of passing a non-money
bill. The rise of the two political parties had its own contribution to the development of
English constitutionalism. It made the functioning of the parliamentary government a
possibility.
• “A continuity of life to liberal institutions through many centuries when elsewhere they
were dead or had never lived, permitted the growth of its own institutions among those
communities in all parts of the world of which England herself was the mother and supplied
the pattern of a constitution when the moment came for any newly liberated community to
found one.”
• The Manga Carta of 1215 established that even the king is subject to the law of the land and
that the people have certain liberties which must be respected by him. The Petition of Right
of 1628 denied taxation without the consent of the Parliament, prohibited arbitrary
imprisonment, and biletting of royal soldiers on private residences, and also outlawed certain
abuses of the royal power. Then, the Bill of Rights of 1689 laid the foundations of constitutional
monarchy. These charters are the product of political crises and they contain the terms of
settlement between the monarch and the people which occurred at various stages of
constitutional development.
• The Parliamentary Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 ending with the People’s Representation
Act of 1970 determine franchise and regulate elections in the country. The Parliament Acts of
1911 and 1949 establish the supremacy of the House of Commons over the House of Lords.
The Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 secures personal liberty against arbitrary detention. The
Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1876 provide for judicial organisations and procedure.
• Several matters of great constitutional importance are covered by the principles of common
law. It is from these principles that the prerogatives of the Crown, the privileges of the
members of Parliament and the liberties of the people flow. The origin of common law dates
back to the fourteenth century when the courts began to lay down case law. They claimed
authority to state the law at a time when the meetings of the Parliament were brief and
infrequent and statute-making was in a stage of infancy.
• The most important feature of the British constitution rests not upon formal law as upon the
usages and customs technically called the ‘conventions’. These usages are the unwritten
rules of political practice and they have been defined by John Stuart Mill as ‘unwritten
maxims of the constitution’.
• Commentaries on the English constitution written by eminent figures are also important in
as much as they have systematised the diverse written and unwritten rules, established an
understandable relationship between one rule of the constitution and the other, and then
linked them into some degrees of unity by reference to central principles of the fundamental
law of the land.
• Conventions of the constitution, a term popularised by Dicey, mean practices and usages
hardened into unwritten rules of political behaviour. That is why, John Stuart Mill has called
them ‘unwritten maxims of the constitution’ and Anson designated them as ‘customs of the
constitution’. They constitute an extra-legal phenomenon in as much as they do not find
their place in the written rules adopted by a legislative or a judicial body. In other words,
conventions mean ‘constitutional practices’, as Prime Minister Asquith said in the House of
Commons in 1910, and they rest upon the usages developed over a long period of history.
Hence, conventions of the constitution “are rules, or unwritten principles, understandings or
maxims, of political behaviour. They are not established in statutes or judicial decisions or

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