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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

The US constitution is a handful of pages, and only a few lines actually specify how the government should function on a day to day basis. If they forgot everything but the constitution and worked out everything else again from scratch, the result would likely be completely unrecognisable.

Furthermore there's an argument to be made that the UK system of government is considerably more modern that that of the US. After all, their system is essentially a direct copy of the UK system of the time, with a few minor tweaks. The house is parliament, the Senate is the House of Lords, and the President is an elected King George V. Signing laws is Royal Assent, dissolving the House is Prorogation, he can even pardon criminals. I say George V specifically because the powers of the crown have been massively reformed since, really from Queen Anne onwards, but the US system has remained frozen in time.

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That’s true of the US but ignores the fact only 3 countries in the world don’t have written constitutions - the UK, New Zealand, and Israel. I’m not being sarcastic when I say a lot of this is managed in the form of strange old traditions that, if stopped, would render the country fairly useless till they’re all codified somewhere.

"would render the country fairly useless till they’re all codified somewhere"

Not really, almost all of the things done by government for the daily management of the country are not related to the constitution and are already codified.

You would need to figure out, agree and codify a mechanism for changing power, but you can arrange it so that you have years to do it and codifying that small part is not that huge of a task; USA had long conventions but that was more because of the need to actually create a country; and many other countries post-revolutions have functioned quite reasonably while codifying the constitutions, because it really doesn't affect the daily things, and you can run on interim rules (in UK's case, continuing as before for a limited time) until it's done.

Don't Canada and Sweden also lack written constitutions?

"According to ... the Constitution Act, 1982, the Canadian Constitution consists of the Canada Act 1982 (which includes the Constitution Act, 1982), acts and orders referred to in its schedule (including in particular the Constitution Act, 1867...), and any amendments to these documents."[0]

"The Basic Laws of Sweden (Swedish: Sveriges grundlagar) are the four constitutional laws of the Kingdom of Sweden that regulate the Swedish political system, acting in a similar manner to the constitutions of most countries. ... Together, they constitute a basic framework that stands above other laws and regulation, and also define which agreements are themselves above normal Swedish law."[1]

You're right, though, that sounds a lot like the arrangement that Israel has, and the Wikipedia article for the "Basic Laws of Israel"[2] says (without citation):

"Israel is one of 6 countries (along with Canada, New Zealand, San Marino, Saudi Arabia and the United Kingdom) that operates entirely or in part according to an uncodified constitution..."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Canada

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Laws_of_Sweden

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Laws_of_Israel

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