What is a political constitution?

Gee, Graham and Webber, Grégoire C. N. (2010) What is a political constitution? Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 30 (2). pp. 273-299. ISSN 0143-6503

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Abstract

The question—what is a political constitution?—might seem, at first blush, fairly innocuous. At one level, the idea of a political constitution seems fairly well settled, at least insofar as most political constitutionalists subscribe to a similar set of commitments, arguments and assumptions. At a second, more reflective level, however, there remains some doubt whether a political constitution purports to be a descriptive or normative account of a real world constitution, such as Britain’s. By exploring the idea of a political constitution as differently articulated by J.A.G. Griffith, Adam Tomkins and Richard Bellamy, this essay explores why the normativity of a political constitution may be indistinct and ill-defined, and how compelling reasons for this indistinctness and ill-definition are to be found in the very idea of a political constitution itself. A political constitution is here conceived as a ‘model’ which supplies an explanatory framework within which to make sense of our constitutional self-understandings. The discipline of thinking in terms of a model opens up a critical space wherein there need not be some stark, all-encompassing choice between constitutional models, which, in turn, allows for more subtle understandings of Britain’s constitution as neither exclusively ‘political’ nor ‘legal’.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	http://ojls.oxfordjournals.org/
Additional Information:	© 2010 the authors
Divisions:	Law
Subjects:	J Political Science > JC Political theory K Law > K Law (General) J Political Science > JF Political institutions (General)
Date Deposited:	02 Jun 2010 11:36
Last Modified:	20 Nov 2024 01:06
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/28151

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