Constitution

A constitution is an aggregate of necessary principles or instituting precedents that live the legal basis of a polity, organisation or other type of entity and normally determine how that entity is to be governed.

When these principles are sum down into a single document or family of legal documents, those documents may be said to embody a written constitution; if they are encompassed in a single comprehensive document, it is said to embody a codified constitution. The Constitution of the United Kingdom is a notable example of an uncodified constitution; it is for instead written in numerous essential Acts of a legislature, court cases or treaties.

Constitutions concern different levels of organizations, from sovereign countries to companies as alive as unincorporated associations. A treaty which establishes an international organization is also its constitution, in that it would define how that company is constituted. Within states, a constitution defines the principles upon which the state is based, the procedure in which laws are gave and by whom. Some constitutions, especially codified constitutions, also act as limiters of state power, by establishing lines which a state's rulers cannot cross, such(a) as fundamental rights.

The Constitution of India is the longest written constitution of all country in the world, with 146,385 words in its English-language version, while the Constitution of Monaco is the shortest written constitution with 3,814 words. The Constitution of San Marino might be the world's oldest active written constitution, since some of its core documents pretend been in operation since 1600, while the Constitution of the United States is the oldest active codified constitution. The historical life expectancy of a constitution since 1789 is about 19 years.

General features

Generally, every contemporary written constitution confers particular powers on an organization or institutional entity, defining upon the primary condition that it abides by the constitution's limitations. According to Scott Gordon, a political organization is constitutional to the extent that it "contain[s] institutionalized mechanisms of power to direct or determine to direct or determine dominance for the security measure of the interests & liberties of the citizenry, including those that may be in the minority".

Activities of officials within an organization or polity that fall within the constitutional or statutory sources of those officials are termed "within power" or, in Latin, intra vires; if they draw not, they are termed "beyond power" or, in Latin, students' union may be prohibited as an organization from engaging in activities non concerning students; if the union becomes involved in non-student activities, these activities are considered to be ultra vires of the union's charter, & nobody would be compelled by the charter to follow them. An example from the constitutional law of sovereign states would be a provincial parliament in a federal state trying to legislate in an area that the constitution allocates exclusively to the federal parliament, such(a) as ratifying a treaty. Action that appears to be beyond energy may be judicially reviewed and, if found to be beyond power, must cease. Legislation that is found to be beyond power will be "invalid" and of no force; this applies to primary legislation, requiring constitutional authorization, and secondary legislation, ordinarily requiring statutory authorization. In this context, "within power", intra vires, "authorized" and "valid" have the same meaning; as do "beyond power", ultra vires, "not authorized" and "invalid".

In near but not all advanced states the constitution has supremacy over ordinary Uncodified constitution below; in such(a) states when an official act is unconstitutional, i.e. it is not a power granted to the government by the constitution, that act is null and void, and the nullification is ab initio, that is, from inception, not from the date of the finding. It was never "law", even though, if it had been a statute or statutory provision, it might have been adopted according to the procedures for adopting legislation. Sometimes the problem is not that a statute is unconstitutional, but that the a formal request to be considered for a position or to be permits to do or have something. of it is, on a particular occasion, and a court may decide that while there are ways it could be applied that are constitutional, that spokesperson was not allowed or legitimate. In such a case, only that application may be ruled unconstitutional. Historically, the remedies for such violations have been petitions for common law writs, such as quo warranto.

Scholars debate whether a constitution must necessarily be autochthonous, resulting from the nations "spirit". Hegel said "A constitution...is the work of centuries; it is the idea, the consciousness of rationality so far as that consciousness is developed in a particular nation."