recognised rights) and less on precedent. Trials are more of an inqui-
sitorial process controlled by the judge and less of a confrontation
between defence and prosecution lawyers. Separate constitutional
courts to review the constitutionality of laws or government decrees
are also to be found in a number of states. Legal education is often
much more concerned with public law and the training of public
administrators in continental European universities than is the case
in Britain and America where syllabuses are preoccupied with the law
of business contracts and crime.
Constitutions and constitutionalism
K. C. Wheare (1951) makes it clear that there are two main senses of
‘constitution’: first, the fundamental political institutions of a
country; second, a written document which usually defines these and
the rights of the citizens of the state. Clearly the United Kingdom
does not have the latter – although there are various legal documents
such as the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, and so on, which are seen
as helping to define its constitutional arrangements. The so-called
‘unwritten’ constitution is one of the distinctive features of only a
few democracies such as the UK, Israel and New Zealand.
As Wheare (1951) and others (e.g. Bogdanor, 1988) have shown,
liberal democratic constitutions usually have a variety of political
functions to perform. First, a symbolic and legitimising role in assert-
ing and demonstrating the democratic credentials of the political
system concerned. Second, they are usually intended to protect and
conserve the fundamental political institutions they define and to
establish how they may be legitimately changed. Third, they are
intended to protect the fundamental rights of individual citizens.
More generally, from a broadly conservative and liberal per-
spective, it may be said that constitutional government means the
‘government of laws, not of men’ and that constitutions exist to limit
the power of the government of the day in the interests of democracy
and individual rights. Conversely, some socialist and radical inter-
pretations would lay greater stress on the idea that constitutions
empower democratic governments to change society to achieve a
more just social order.
Where written constitutions exist, they often mark a revolu-
tionary change in the political system, so that they may be originally
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