ABSTRACT
A peculiarity of the UK legal system is that the Constitution rests completely on the principle of parliamentary sovereignty rather than on a document of constitution. Neither entry into the European Union nor legislative initiatives such as the Human Rights Act 1998, which might be thought to represent profound constitutional events, either necessarily or inevitably change this state of affairs. It remains the case that no law has any greater formal weight than another and none has a superior formal quality that can protect it against being superseded. 1 In effect the Constitution is continually remade as more law is passed. At the same time there is no notion that the Constitution is incomplete; rather the basic idea is that the Constitution is always complete but always open to change by way of just another law. This cleavage is mirrored in the metaphysics of the state, which Kantorowicz (1997) explored in his study, The King's Two Bodies. The state is manifest in the simultaneous double body of the sovereign, one physical/natural and the other abstract/metaphysical: both human and divine; both perfect and lacking in perfection; both frail and eternal. In the UK, the body of law that is the Constitution shares these characteristics, but the turnover of that particular body is much more rapid; each day the body of constitutional law dies and another takes its place, while all the while the Constitution remains extant and in perpetuity. To put it another way, there is a condition of permanent plenitude which pre-supposes continuous breach.
