Hard and Soft Constitutions
Noel Cox · 2016
This chapter discusses the relationship between law and government, and it is important because constitutional laws are a sub-set of general laws, and not inherently distinct despite growth in the concept of &s;public law&s; as a separate category of laws. The nature is a product of the historical evolution of the state; a state is primarily a product of evolution, even where it is ostensibly the outcome of immediate political expediency, chance, or colonial arbitrariness. The chapter describes the concept of inflexibility and that might be termed &s;constitutional arteriosclerosis&s; the lack of flexibility leading to state illness. The notion of the flexibility or inflexibility of a constitution is what is meant by the concept of the hard or soft constitution. It examines the hypothesis that the advance of the West from the middle Ages onwards was a consequence of the flexibility of the constitutional models which were developing.