Sources of Caribbean Constitutional Law

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CHAPTER 1

In this chapter, we examine the sources of some of the most important aspects of our

constitutional law. As is well established, the English Constitution has been largely

uncoded, although it is to be found in such statutes as the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights

of 1689 and the Representation of the People Acts. Caribbean Constitutional Law shares

these sources and it is to illustrate that fact that, in this chapter, we briefly outline, seriatim,

the sources of due process of law; the status and powers of the Sovereign; how Parliament

is regulated; the operation and status of the judicial system; and citizenship and

nationality. We shall then consider the principles on which the reception of English Law is

based.

A DUE PROCESS OF LAW

No serious student of constitutional law can fully appreciate the subject unless he reads

Blackstone’s Commentaries of the Laws of England. In Book I, the learned writer outlines the

sources of the rights of persons and illustrates the meaning of ‘due process’ by reference

to Magna Carta. Blackstone avers that, with regard to the administration of justice, Magna

Carta forbade the denial of justice and its delay to all citizens; fixed the court of common

pleas to be held at Westminster; directed assizes to be held in the proper counties;

directed the holding of inquests in matters of sudden and unnatural death; and

prohibited ministers ‘from holding pleas of the crown or trying any criminal charge,

whereby many forfeitures might otherwise have unjustly accrued to the exchequer’.

Magna Carta ‘confirmed and established the liberties of the city of London, and all other

cities, boroughs, towns and ports of the Kingdom … And lastly (which alone would have

merited the title that it bears, of the great charter) it protects every individual of the nation

in the full enjoyment of his life, his liberty and his property, unless declared to be forfeited

by the judgment of his peers or the law of the land’.1

Thus when one studies the terms of Magna Carta carefully, one finds that they lay the

foundations for the protection of the right to life, the right to personal liberty, the right to

the protection of property and the right not ‘to be arrested, imprisoned, put out of (one’s)

freedom, outlawed, destroyed or put upon in any way except by the lawful judgment of

(one’s) peers or the law of the land’.

The declaration was confirmed by many subsequent laws including a statute, 28 Edw

III c 3 (1354) where, for the first time we find the expression ‘due process of law’ in the

following statement:

… no man of whatever estate or condition that he be, shall be put out of land or tenement,

nor taken nor imprisoned, nor disinherited, nor put to death, without being brought in

answer by due process of law.

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SOURCES OF CARIBBEAN CONSTITUTIONAL LAW

1 Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1803, pp 423–24.