What are written / unwritten and codified / uncodified constitutions?
Historically, of the key methods of classification of the constitution has been that if they are written or unwritten constitutions. Most countries have written constitutions for example India, Germany, France, US etc. Examples of unwritten constitution include UK, New Zealand and Israel.
We note here that difference between written and unwritten constitutions is of degree and not of kind. This implies that a written constitution has proportionately more written and less unwritten elements while an unwritten constitution has less written and more unwritten elements.
In fact unwritten constitution is a misnomer. The British constitution does not have document which can be called a “Constitution’ but it is embodied in the written form, within statutes, court judgments, and treaties. Besides, parliamentary constitutional conventions and royal prerogatives are other written sources of the British Constitution.
A further difference between these two is that while written constitution is a product of deliberate human action, the unwritten constitution is a result of growth. The written constitution is drafted by an agency (such as constituent assembly); unwritten constitution is a combination of customs and conventions which are not drafted by anybody in particular. Moreover, although UK constitution is labeled as unwritten in a single document, most of its constitutional rules are actually written down in many legislations. Due to this, in recent times, it had become fashionable to classify the constitutions as codified and uncodified ones. A codified constitution is one that is contained in a single document, which is the single source of constitutional law in a state. An uncodified constitution is one that is not contained in a single document, consisting of several different sources, which may be written or unwritten. By this definition, India and US have codified constitutions. UK has an uncodified constitution because it is neither written nor its constitutional rules come from a single document.
