Are Constitutions Necessary?
Does a state need a book of rules by which to operate? And who are those rules for, anyway?
‘Constitutions are not just for the rulers’
H. Kumarasingham is Reader in Politics and History at the University of Edinburgh and co-editor of The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
The UK deigns to go without a codified constitution with an allied ‘refusal to define’ propensity in constitutional matters, as Sir Ivor Jennings once put it. This enables it to be constantly changed, contested and put to use in ways that might appear startling to past and future generations, not to mention our own. More than rules and laws, constitutions are adaptable phenomena necessary for society.
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