ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relationship between law and government, and it is important because constitutional laws are a sub-set of general laws, and not inherently distinct despite growth in the concept of 'public law' as a separate category of laws. The nature is a product of the historical evolution of the state; a state is primarily a product of evolution, even where it is ostensibly the outcome of immediate political expediency, chance, or colonial arbitrariness. The chapter describes the concept of inflexibility and that might be termed 'constitutional arteriosclerosis' the lack of flexibility leading to state illness. The notion of the flexibility or inflexibility of a constitution is what is meant by the concept of the hard or soft constitution. It examines the hypothesis that the advance of the West from the middle Ages onwards was a consequence of the flexibility of the constitutional models which were developing.
