In which countries is the constitution automatically statute law? I believe England is one. Is the US among them? Is there a legal term for such a constitution and what is its opposite legally referred to as?
Neither England nor any other jurisdiction in the UK, nor the UK as a whole, has a written constitution anyway, merely a collection of statutes and conventions.
It’s not clear what you would consider as “automatically” becoming a statute. As I understand it, a constitution is ipso facto a law, but a special one that overrides all others if it is judged that there is a conflict. That conflict remains, and must be resolved one way or another: someone has to rule on whether a constitution overrides some other law in any given case.
What we have in the UK is a statute that established a Supreme Court to rule on whether or not there is such a conflict and whether Parliament should re-consider a law. What the US has, AIUI, is a Supreme Court that can strike down a law. But in neither case is there anything automatic. Court or Parliament/Congress, some human institution has to consider case by case.
IANA lawyer, but I believe there’s a fundamental difference between a statute and a article or amendment to a constitution.
Generally speaking, a constitution is the collection of principles and precedents that defines the structure of the state’s government, along with some basic legal provisions that sort of “set the stage” so to speak for life in that state going forward. So in the US, it would be things like Article 1 which sets out what Congress is, that would do that definition part, and things like the 1st Amendment that sets that legal stage of freedom of speech. Sometimes it’s written, like in the US, but in others, like the UK, it’s more of a collection of precedents, case law and generally understood concepts. It’s not written, but it’s well understood.
As I understand statutes, they’re generally concrete and specific laws passed by legislative bodies that are not part of case law or precedent (yet). They’re passed under the aegis of the constitution, and have to adhere to its restrictions and guarantees.
So for example…to try and break it all down-
A hypothetical state’s constitution might say that “The government shall not enact surveillance on its people”.
A statute would be an act passed by its legislature to legalize or prohibit something… but it can’t legalize surveillance, as it’s prohibited by their constitution. This is separate from case law/precedent, in that it’s done by the legislative body, not determined as part of the legal process.
Case law/precedent might also point out that surveillance is ok in certain limited situations- like police using surveillance equipment as part of a search warrant or something, but that requires it to have happened and have been challenged in court, with the case law/precedent as the result of that case that radiates beyond it.
They’re all law, but one’s part of the constitution, another’s written by a legislative body, and the third/fourth are the results of legal wrangling.
I am a lawyer and I can’t understand your question at all.
The Constitution is the basic law of a country or sub national entity. It creates a Government, a federal or unitary structure, a legislature and delineates powers. It may do other thing like create a Bill of RIghts and a Court system or it may leave that to the legislature.
A Constitution is the foundation of the house that is a country’s legal system.
Statues are laws passed by a legislature. Acting under the authority of the Constitution.
I have no idea where the idea of precedent came in. Precedent exists in sone countries, mostly common law ones. Its less important in civil law ones.
Statues?
Some countries only have a constitution as window dressing, for external consumption. The ruling entity is what decides is legal and not, and there is often–at least internally–very little appeal to the constitution for what they’re going to do.
Hey any Parliament building worth its salt has statues. 
Statutes are almost always in modern parlance considered to be measures enacted by a competent legislature.
May I introduce you to:
*The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
*The People’s Republic of China
*The Democractic People’s Republic of Korea
*…
It’s not that rare a thing to have a constitution that has no meaning. And the ruling party issues decrees to set up the actual organs of government. Hey, sometimes they sugarcoat it with a constitution that also sets up those government organs, but not always. It’s more of a fait accompli.
This being General Questions please share some actual cites supporting your claims.
It looks to me like I provided three of those. Are you not familiar with those countries and their system of governance?
I don’t think the OP was asking about constitutions that, in practice, aren’t applied with the kind of interpretations of concepts like rights and due process of law that we would expect.
But I still don’t get what OP did mean: countries where there is no specific document identified as a “constitution” (so ordinary statute law does the job)? Or written constitutions that somehow automatically override statute law without some sort of case-by-case legal process? It would help if there were some definition of terms.
I seems an odd question. In general, a country’s constitution, amongst other requirements, provides the mechanism by which statute law comes into being. It may provide restrictions on what statue laws may be created, but it isn’t a statue, and it doesn’t contain law in the sense that statues do. It makes constitutional law. An amendment to a constitution, if allowed, might instantly strike out existing statue law, but that it doesn’t make it statue law. It might add a provision that works like statute law, but it isn’t statute law, because it wasn’t created as a statute. Similarly, a constitutional amendment might wipe out case law as well. That doesn’t make it case law either.
IANAL either, but so far as I understand it, most countries will have a mix of constitutional, case, common and statute law. Some countries add absolute law of monarchs. Constitutional law is not statue law, simply by definition.
Curiously, Australia’s constitution is itself an act of the UK parliament. But this was a one time act setting up the constitution and divesting control. Our constitution makes for very dull reading. Basically it sets up all the housekeeping rules for how the federation is built, laws made, responsibilities divided, and how governments are formed.
Thanks AK 84 . I want to confirm that a constitution (no matter which country ) does as you say
“creates a Government, a federal or unitary structure, a legislature and delineates powers. … create a Bill of RIghts and a Court system or it may leave that to the legislature”.
and that statutes (no matter which country) are as you say “are laws passed by a legislature”. There are websites that seem to muddy the water as to the definition of the above terms.
Whole books can (and have) been written on "what constitutes a constitution"? Whole careers can (and have) been dedicated to this question.
At its very core a constitution is the basic definition of a state and its organs. It does not need to be written as the UK’s is not, but one can be extremely detailed as well, as the Constitutions of the UK’s former colonies India and Pakistan are.
What differentiates Constitutional Law from other laws is that while every other law is enacted and promulgated pursuant to some specified power a Constitutional provision does not. The answer to under what authority a constitutional provision exists is always “its the Constitution”.
To illustrate, the US President draws a salary based on an Act of Congress and that Act, which is a statute, is authorized by the enumerated powers of Congress given in the Constitution. Congress and the Presidency themselves are creations of the Constitution. However, the questions as to under what authority did the Constitution create Congress, grant it specified powers, and do the same for the Presidency can be answered simply by saying, "they are in the Constitution". There is no need to go further back.
If the question is whether there are countries that don’t have a codified constitution but merely a body of constitutional law that is composed of individual statutes (plus potentially unwritten conventions), and where it is therefore possible to “amend the constitution” by means of adopting a statute whose adoption process does not differ from any other normal statute, then I am aware of three countries to which this would apply: The United Kingdom, Israel, and New Zealand.
Until 1984 the “constitution” of Canada was the British North America Act passed by the British parliament. Any changes to that had to be passed by Britain, usually at the request of Canada passing a resolution asking for it. In 1984 thy passed a resolution asking Britain to devolve the definition and amending power of the Canadian constitution to Canada.
The problem with the UK, as I understand it, is that without a written constitution, what was established norms that the parliament could not violate was subject to interpretation; depended what the ultimate court decided was acceptable.
It was 1982.
Plus, I don’t see why you’re putting constitution in quotation marks.
The BNA Act created Canada as a federal state, set out the powers of the federal Parliament and the provincial Legislatures, set out the authority of the monarch as head of state, and dealt with the parliamentary structure, including the distribution of seats between the provinces. That’s a constitution.
The Act is still in force; wasn’t replaced in 1982, just re-named the Constitution Act, 1982, with an amendment giving the provinces clearer powers over natural resources.
Pretty much all laws in force today were enacted under the authority of the provisions enacted in 1867. Only a few have been enacted under the authority of post-1867 amendments (such as the Employment Insurance Act.)
There is an argument that San Marino has an uncodified constitution. I don’t know enough about it to say whether that’s accurate.
The difficulty is that some people assume a constitution has to be codified and possibly entrenched, putting it on a different level than ordinary statute law.
As Schnitte has indicated, there are some countries, notably the UK, where the constitution is based on common law and ordinary statute law. Using a codified/entrenched definition of “constitution” is too limiting.
British constitutional law is a wondrous thing. It consists to a large extent of unwritten conventions and to some extent of Acts of Parliament, in other words, “ordinary” statutes. Owing to the doctrine of sovereignty of Parliament (according to which there is nothing that Parliament could not legally do), Parliament can, however, at any time adopt a new Act superseding prior Acts of Parliament or unwritten conventions. Since the adoption process for such Acts is the same as for any other statute, and since there is no judicial review that could strike down an Act of Parliament, there is, in theory, an unlimited possibility for Parliament to amend the constitutional framework by ordinary legislative means.
Occasionally, this is done. A prominent recent example is the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 which fixed the term for which Parliament is elected at five years; prior to that, five years was only the maximum duration after which an election had to be held, but the Prime Minister was free to call an early election at any time and for any reason before that. (During World War II, statutory interference with the terms of Parliament was even more intrusive: Britain held no general elections during the war; the Parliament that was elected in 1935 passed, once a year, a statute extending its own term for another year, until 1945 when the first election in a decade was held).
You would think that this means the UK has no constitution, since Parliament can, legally, do whatever it wants to. Nonetheless, it is very common for Brits to speak of British constitutional law, and the subject is studied as such in the law curriculum.