1 Core Principles of the Traditional British Constitutions Cristina E. Parau Department of Politics and International Relations University of Oxford (draft) (forthcoming) One of the distinguishing characteristics of the British constitutions is its indeterminacy. No clear boundary divides what is constitutional from what is not. What counts as constitutional in practice has never been codified, but is scattered about in sundry documents spanning ten centuries. The very notion of a master legal instrument that one might call ‘the constitution’ is alien to the British legal tradition; thus, Blackstone, the great commentator on the English common law, refers to ‘the British constitutions’ in the plural, and this classical conception of his has been adopted for this chapter, the more faithfully to express the breathing reality of the thing. It is not easy to address the question, ‘What were the British constitutions before 1989?’ when inevitably many different answers can be given about so essentially contestable an object. For if like any polity the British constitutional order could not function without a reasonably well-defined core, the margins are all as fuzzy as quantum mechanics. An organic law arisen haphazardly piecemeal in time and space must be understood in the same spirit. In this spirit this chapter provides no systematic doctrine as a benchmark to evaluate the extent and intent of change in Great Britain before the contemporary era of reform. Nonetheless a general consensus does exist as to where the British constitution is to be found. First and foremost it is comprised in Acts of Parliament the constitutionality of which is not in dispute: Magna Carta (1215), Bill of Rights (1689), the Act of Settlement (1701), the Act of Union (1707), and the Great Reform Act (1832). It is a series of celebrated texts, beginning in the 13 th century, that have made the British way of governing both pioneering and peculiar. It must be borne in mind that these documents are one strand of an ongoing part-codification of the British constitutions which, however, is not limited to Acts of Parliament. Jurisprudence or case law will be touched on as well as unwritten conventions and classic secondary sources. Uncodified constitutions bring about that the most celebrated commentaries on them which come to be taken as authoritative statements of their meaning, relied on by politicians and lawyers alike. The organisation of this chapter follows the basic principles that are at the heart of these sources of the British constitution, namely, the sovereignty of Parliament; the Union of kingdoms; the value of individual liberty; checks and balances; judicial subordination; and, latterly, membership of the European Union. Parliament sovereignty Every significant treatise on the British constitutions identifies parliament sovereignty as a fundamental principle. The classics purport to furnish conclusive definitions of parliamentary sovereignty. As early as the 17 th century, and by a man today renowned for asserting the right of judges to nullify Acts of Parliament, it was said to be ‘so transcendent and absolute, that it cannot be confined, either for causes or persons, within any bounds’ (Edward Coke quoted in Blackstone [1765] 1809: 160). In the next century William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1766-1768), the first ‘liberal’, ‘elegant’ and ‘moderate’ treatment of the constitutions (Prest 2008: p), defined it as ‘omnipotence … to do everything that is not