Abstract

The concept of constitutionalism has veritably evolved over the years, from simply reflecting the nature of governance, to limiting the scope of governance as per the accepted rules, and thereafter to ensure that the governance reflects the upliftment of the socio-economic conditions of the individuals. Substantive constitutionalism has traditionally been deemed to mirror the notion of legal constitutionalism, which essentially means the entrenchment of core constitutional values in a written document, with a corollary provision for strong-form judicial review to protect those fundamental values. Political constitutionalism of a jurisdiction like the UK, however, has continued to challenge this notion by effectively incorporating substantive rules of constitutionalism within the realm of its largely unwritten constitution, based primarily on the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. Global constitutionalism, emerging from a decentralized global constitution with largely unwritten rules, has proposed the idea of ‘constitutionalism in transit’ in the context of an increasingly interconnected global world. The purpose of this paper is to define and elucidate how the unwritten rules of a nation-state (the UK) and that of the global constitution are able to broadly implement and enforce the contemporary tenets of maximum constitutionalism.

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