[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_constitutions
The UK has an uncodified constitution that predates the US by over 500 years, originally founded on the Magna Carta, signed in 1215.
> The question Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another, seems never to have been started either on this or our side of the water… (But) between society and society, or generation and generation there is no municipal obligation, no umpire but the law of nature. We seem not to have perceived that, by the law of nature, one generation is to another as one independant nation to another… On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation… Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of 19. years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force and not of right.
I think Thomas Jefferson is a reputable source for my assertion.
If the US were founded on this principle… it would have been part of the constitution.
If that were true, we wouldn't have had the first block of amendments. There's plenty of stuff that didn't make it into the original constitution because the founders thought it was obvious.
This largely ignores the rest of society and what they were thinking. From the first perspective, these are all ideas that got smuggled in.
They can also declare that legislation violates human rights, but that declaration is non-binding. They are effectively just asking Parliament to go back and fix the law.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Court_of_the_United_Ki...
You need more than one because the founding of the US was a group effort. Not all ideas pitched by any given founder made it in, and even when one did many of those who voted to include it had a different understanding of what it meant.
Every so often the foundations of common law get to be re-evaluated which could be disastrous. But in practice it's likely the foundations would be similar cycle to cycle. Further, to the degree that the roots of rulings change due to a new constitution, don't those ruling trees need to change? The constitution changing is a signal that the people, their needs and their values have changed and so should all rulings based on those ideas.
--As an aside, I'm biased against common law. I appreciate my ancestors but I question accepting all of their prior decisions as taken until proven otherwise.
It's easy to envision invaliding precedents that rely on things that have changed, but the process of creating those precedents takes so long nobody really knows what the new law means until it's tested. Furthermore, the arguments to invalidate them are also going to be in the form of more legal arguments, so you're adding another whole dimension to the problem. Given how opaque the law is to the average person right now, I'd say we're already at the limit.
FWIW I'm biased against common law too, because it seems to take what is actually policy and brand it as if it were universal truth.