English Origins of America’s Constitution
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enjoyed ‘‘the rights of Englishmen,’’ and participated in a culture basically
English.
There are, of course, a number of important differences between the
English and American constitutions that should be understood. As we
noted earlier, the English Constitution is not a ‘‘written’’ constitution.
That is, it is not contained in any single document like the American Constitution of 1787. It consists, rather, of (1) certain charters and statutes
that are regarded as part of the fundamental law, (2) principles derived
from the common law, and (3) a great variety of political and legal customs and traditions. Statutes that enjoy a constitutional status are those
which deal with the distribution and exercise of power, and those which
guarantee certain freedoms. Three great political documents which are
essentially compacts or agreements between the Crown and the Nation
(the people and their representatives) stand out as prominent landmarks
in English constitutional history. These are Magna Charta (1215), the Petition of Right (1628), and the Bill of Rights (1689), which constitute, in
the words of the great parliamentary leader Lord Chatham, ‘‘the Bible of
the English Constitution.’’ Many of the individual rights guaranteed in
these documents, as we shall later observe, reappear in our first State
constitutions, in our Federal Constitution, and in our Bill of Rights. The
‘‘law of the land’’ clause in Magna Charta, for example, which later came
to be known as ‘‘due process of law,’’ will be found in the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments of the United States Constitution. Magna Charta is
often regarded as the foundation of Anglo-American liberties, because it
established the principle that all Englishmen, not just the Lords, are entitled to personal liberty, and that no man, including the King himself, is
above the law.
Another and actually more fundamental difference between the English and American constitutions concerns the question of sovereignty.
Sovereignty signifies the highest governmental or legal authority. Under
the English Constitution, legal sovereignty resides in Parliament. Parliament, in other words, is supreme, and its authority cannot be challenged
by the Crown or the judiciary. There is no supreme court, as in the United
States, which has the right to declare an act of Parliament unconstitutional. Parliament decides for itself whether its laws are constitutional.