CONSTITUTION - Black's Law Dictionary

What is CONSTITUTION? Definition of CONSTITUTION in Black's Law Dictionary - Legal dictionary - Glossary of legal terms.

The  organic and  fundamental law of a nation  or state,  which  may be written or unwritten, establishing the character and conception of its government, laying  the basic principles to which its internal life is to be conformed,  organizing  the government, and  regulating, distributing, and limiting the  functions of its  different departments, and prescribing the extent and manner of the exercise of sovereign powers. A charter  of government deriving its whole authority from the  governed. Fairhope Single Tax  Corporation  v. Melville, 193 Ala. 289, 69 So. 466, 470. See,  also,  Browne v. City of New  York,  213 App. Div. 206, 211 N.Y.S. 306.

In a more general  sense, any fundamental or important law or edict; as the Novel Constitutions of Justinian; the Constitutions of Clarendon.

In  American law. The written instrument agreed upon  by the people  of the Union or of a particular state, as the  absolute rule  of action and  decision for all departments and  officers of the  government in respect to all the points  covered  by it, which  must control  until it shall be changed by the authority which  established it, and in opposition to which any act or ordinance of any such department or officer  is null and  void. Cooley, Const. Lim. 3.

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