Compliance (constitutional)

Constitutional compliance refers to practices, efforts, or systems to achieve or maintain obedience of government officials with relevant provisions of a constitution or statutes that implement it.

Method

The method of constitutional compliance is to trace a path from official acts back to provisions of the relevant constitution that authorized it, along an unbroken chain of logical derivation, through statutes, regulations, or judicial decisions, while also exhaustively searching and not finding any such chain that would restrict or forbid the action. If there is any break in the chain of authorization, then the action is unconstitutional, and the action, if continued, is noncompliant, or a violation of the constitution.

Such a method is sometimes called a decision rule or algorithm. Although the application of a node in the chain to a real world situation may involve an element of judgment, once a determination of a node in the decision chain is made, the rest of the decision process is supposed to involve only a rigorous application of logic.

See also

• Statutory compliance
• Originalism
• Constitutionalism

External links

• Dictionary of the History of IDeaS: Constitutionalism
• Constitutional Law "Constitutions, bibliography, links"