Skip to content

Comment on What makes a constitution endure?

Comments

Culture. Law and culture are symbiotic and complementary. One supports and sustains the other, if they are in conflict then either one dominates the other (resulting in anarchy or a police state, for example) or society pays the ongoing cost of that conflict (see the drug war, modern copyright law, etc.)

You can't just magic up a few pages of text and transmogrify it into "law" or a constitution. Constitutions that work are born from cultures with a history of the rule of law, and they represent a distillation of firmly held principles of the people. A good constitution represents a cheat sheet for the ideals of the people, and something that if all law were taken away a keen observer would still be able to identify the constitutional bullet points as extant aspects of society.

AboutSource Built by g1lg1l

Hackerly is an independent reader for Hacker News, built on the public HN API. Not affiliated with Y Combinator.