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The Sources of State Authority (1) Objectives This lecture has four objectives: (1) to define what is meant by constitutionalism; (2) to provide an overview of the basic propositions that underpin the established British and American constitutional doctrines; (3) to review the constitutional pressures which have challenged those doctrines; and, (4) to highlight the contrasts and similarities between the two systems. (2) Defining Constitutionalism We will employ Fred Ridley’s (1988: p. 317) broad definition of a constitution as: ‘...the whole system of government of a country, the collection of rules, written and unwritten, which regulate the government’. Any investigation of the sources of state authority must address two preliminary conundrums. The first of these relates to the ambiguity, which surrounds the explanation of what a constitution actually involves. Britain’s unwritten constitution and its disaggregated system of laws, conventions and principles have tended to obscure the definition of the function and powers of the institutions of the state. Secondly, the British constitution’s ‘unwritten’ or ‘unformalised’ nature, as Neville Johnson (1977) has more