Uncodified Constitutions and the Question of Political Legitimacy

This book seeks to examine and explore an issue within the study of constitutionalism that is an extensive phenomenon that cannot be easily reduced merely to the written legal document. Now this claim is a quite obvious truth, yet the scope of uncodifiable – that is to say, those aspects of law and constitutionalism that escape or avoid being framed in codified or written form – are hard to embrace by legal science. Hence, our intention in this volume was to explore the issue from many different points of view and provide a useful reflection on this topic. […] One can say that we started from the topics related to legal aspects of uncodified constitutions, and then we came to the concept of political legitimacy by going through many different views on the main subject matter of this work. The volume’s intention was to highlight this issue of the issues of constitutionalism, codification, legitimacy, and political stability that are of extreme importance for contemporary political and legal sciences and offer some valuable reflections about these issues that might get scholars interested in these questions and concerns.

Łukasz Perlikowski
Uncodified Constitutions and the Question of Political Legitimacy. Introduction / 7

Clifford A. Bates
The Un-codifiable in any Constitutional Order / 13

Adam Bosiacki
Shaping Constitutional Conventions in the Past of Poland and the Practice of the Third Polish Republic (since 1989) / 27

Aldona Domańska, Magdalena Wrzalik
Mechanism of Government Accountability in the United Kingdom / 39

Patrick Higgins
Quasi-Writtenness and Constitutionalism: Socio-Historical Hermeneutics Between Text and Context En Route to Meaning / 51

Jacek Bartyzel
The Natural Constitution versus the Social Contract in the Political Philosophy of French Traditionalists / 83

Maria Kądzielska
The Nihilistic Approach to the Constitutional Application in China / 101

Łukasz Perlikowski
Political Legitimacy and Human Rights in the Light of Uncodified Constitution. The Case of Israel / 119

Marcin Jędrysiak
Russian Discussions Regarding the October Manifesto before World War I – an Unwritten Constitution or an Empty Promise? / 135

Arkadiusz Barut
The Autonomy of the Democratic and Liberal Aspect in Carls Schmitt’s Unwritten Constitutional Concept / 157

Authors / 173

Łukasz Perlikowski