The Constitution of Great Britain. Features, structure and sources of the Basic Law of the United Kingdom

The Constitution of Great Britain, which has a number of characteristic features, is a unique phenomenon in the modern world. The first feature is its historical character: as a set of legislative norms, precedents and customs that determine the structure and authority of government bodies, the nature of the relationship between the state and citizens of the country, the Constitution of Britain developed gradually.

The second distinctive feature of the British Basic Law is its flexibility. For the revision of any constitutional norms, it is not necessary to go through a complex and lengthy procedure of modification (supplementation) practiced in other countries. The flexibility of the constitution does not at all mean its instability. The well-known British conservatism acts as a guarantee of stability of the Basic Law of the country.

Another feature is that there is no single act with the title "Constitution of Great Britain". In this sense, it is unwritten. The written, that is, fixed on paper, part of the British Constitution includes various legislative acts aimed at regulating issues of a constitutional nature.

The Constitution of Great Britain has three components:

• statute law;
• Common (case law) ;
• Constitutional agreements.

It is not possible to establish the exact number of sources of law that the Constitution of Great Britain includes, due to the lack of criteria by which one or another source should be attributed to one part of the document.

The source of statutory law are acts adopted in accordance with the procedure by the parliament and sanctioned by the head of state (statutes), as well as acts adopted by other public authorities on the basis of rights delegated by the supreme legislative body (acts of delegated legislation). Most of the acts of a constitutional nature were adopted at different times by the British Parliament. The structure of the statutory law is made up of normative acts in force to this day:

• Legal acts adopted several centuries ago (Magna Carta, Bill of Rights, etc.);
• Laws passed in the last century (Laws on Parliament, Law on the House of Commons, Laws on the Ministers of the Crown, etc.).

Common law in the UK is created by the courts. Judges, guided by the principle of "strictly adhere to the previously resolved" (stare decisis), apply precedents to the specific circumstances and facts of each case. Thus, sources of common law are judicial precedents - norms and principles that were formulated in specific cases. As a rule, they are decisions of so-called high courts on constitutional issues. Judicial precedents are used to regulate some of the rights of citizens, as well as matters relating to the privileges of the crown.

Constitutional agreements (they are also called constitutional customs, convention norms) are part of political practice, when political forces establish rules or conclude agreements that turn into norm.

The legal sources of the British Basic Law also include the published opinions of authoritative scholars on law, that is, doctrinal sources.