Where the UK constitution comes from and how its uncodified sources — statute, common law, prerogative and convention — combine into a working framework of government.
Without a single founding document, everything in UK public law turns on knowing which rule comes from where and how much force it carries. This chapter starts with the distinction between legal and non-legal sources and the principal legal sources, then moves to parliamentary sovereignty as the central organising principle and how the courts qualify it through the treatment of constitutional statutes and the principle of legality in statutory interpretation. It then examines the royal prerogative and its relationship with statute, the dualist approach to international law alongside the mechanics of the Human Rights Act 1998, and the conventions that bind political actors without being enforceable in court. It closes with devolution, the limits of devolved legislative competence and the UK's partial separation of powers.
