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Cristina E Parau

2022

Department of Politics and

Core Principles of the Traditional British Constitutions Cristina E. Parau Department of Politics and International Relations Un Page 1 1 Core Principles of the Traditional British Constitutions Cristina E. Parau Department of Politics and International Relations University of Oxford (draft) (forthcoming) One of the distinguishing characteristics of the British constitutions is its indeterminacy. No clear boundary divides what is constitutional from what is not. What counts as constitutional in practice has never been codified, but is scattered about in sundry documents spanning ten centuries. The very notion of a master legal instrument that one might call ‘the constitution’ is alien to the British legal tradition; thus, Blackstone, the great commentator on the English common law, refers to ‘the British constitutions’ in the plural, and this classical conception of his has been adopted for this chapter, the more faithfully to express the …