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Constitutional Law
Constitutional law is the study of foundational laws that govern the scope of powers and authority of various bodies in relation to the creation and execution of other laws by a government. A constitution binds a government or governments, limiting the contexts in which rules may be created, interpreted and force may be applied. Constitutions may reference various bodies, including organizations, associations, stateless peoples and nation-states.
Constitutional laws may often be considered second order rulemaking or rules about making rules. Generally speaking constitutions may be of a federal type, in which several levels of government coexist with exclusive or shared areas of jurisdiction over lawmaking, application and enforcement. An example of this kind of constitution is that of the United States. In the European Union, though, there is heated debate about federalism, with some Europeans regarding a federalist Europe as a threat to national identity, while other Europeans would welcome a federal system. Constitutional laws may also be of a unitary type where the powers of government rest in one central administration and legislature, though in unitary constitutional states, there is often a delegation of power or authority to local or municipal authorities, however the central legislature retains the right to recall its authority at anytime.
Other types of constitutional law also exist, such as confederations, in which a group of nation-states each with its own sovereignty create a common body to deal with certain common issues in which limited powers are transferred to the confederation authority, common in custom unions. The central authority may be referred to in federal terms though on the clear understanding that it has no powers other than those specifically delegated to it by the participating states. Two examples of these types of constitutional system are the European Union and Switzerland. This was also the first form of government created by the thirteen colonies after the American Revolution in the Articles of Confederation. Some of the southern states of the USA attempted to return from federalism to confederalism in the nineteenth century but were prevented by federal military force in the American civil war.
Source: Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (see Copyrights for details).