Arguments Against Constitutional Conventions

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To give conventions justiciable entitlement would be taking away from the highly advantageous flexibility that the UK Constitution has attained from remaining uncodified. Further, the large volume of conventions may provide a difficulty in enforcing them within the courts. In contrast, it could be argued that codifying select conventions may bring certainty to many unclear areas, such as defining the Ministerial Code partly did, thus providing an easier structure for conventions to be enforced legally. However, conventions are merely seen as a moral and political obligations, and should not upon breach have legally enforceable consequences. The argument against whether the court should enforce conventions will be supported and discussed in this essay. Constitutional conventions were once defined by Freeman as ‘a whole code of political maxims, universally acknowledged in theory and universally carried out in practice’. Essentially making them rules of practice that have no legal capability. This alone gives doubt to whether we should …show more content…

Reparation for breach of such rules will not be affected by any legal sanction’. So the benefit of giving justiciability to conventions would be limited, as currently the political consequences of breaching can be extreme and seen as just in many circumstances. However, it may due to the argument of certainty, be benefiting to allow enforceability for select conventions, but only for ones that ‘affect individuals closely enough’, as those that don’t affect the general public essentially aren’t worth giving enforceability to. This giving a similar approach to the Australian Constitution which could be

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