How the world’s oldest functioning governing document was built to last.
The British constitutional system from which the American colonists separated in 1776 was not what Americans today understand as a written constitutional system. It was “unwritten”: There was no superintending written constitution that limited the power and controlled the acts of the legislature. In 18th-century Britain, Parliament was supreme. Whatever Parliament enacted with royal assent was the supreme law, which Parliament could always undo. “[T]he legislature, being in truth the sovereign power, is…of absolute authority,” William Blackstone wrote in his influential 18th-century Commentaries on the Laws of England. “[I]t acknowledges no superior upon earth.” “The power and jurisdiction of parliament…is so transcendent and absolute,” he reiterated, that Parliament “hath sovereign and uncontrollable authority in the making, confirming, enlarging, restraining, abrogating, repealing, reviving, and expounding of” all the laws of the realm.
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