Definition
In modern legal usage, CONSTITUTIONS refers principally to the plural of "constitution" — the foundational governing documents of political entities. A constitution is the supreme law establishing the structure of government, enumerating powers, limiting authority, and securing fundamental rights. The United States Constitution is the paradigm example; each of the fifty states also has its own constitution.
In a distinct and historically significant ecclesiastical sense, CONSTITUTIONS refers to formal bodies of canon law enacted by councils, synods, or papal legates — authoritative decrees binding on the church and its clergy within a given province or kingdom. This is the sense preserved in the historical legal dictionaries and remains relevant to legal historians and researchers working in ecclesiastical or medieval English law.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Plural of "constitution" — the systems of fundamental principles according to which a nation, state, or body is governed; also, the composition or makeup of something.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): "The mode in which a state or society is organized; the manner in which sovereign power is distributed; the fundamental rules, written or unwritten, that regulate the relations of government organs to each other and to the citizens."
The gap here is not between common and legal meaning in the modern sense — those largely align — but between modern usage and historical legal usage. When a researcher encounters CONSTITUTIONS in pre-modern English legal texts, the term may refer not to national governing charters but to ecclesiastical decrees of councils and legates, a meaning entirely lost in contemporary common usage.
Recognized Forms
/SUBTYPES
1. Civil or Political Constitutions: The supreme law documents of sovereign states, federations, and their subdivisions. Written constitutions (as in the United States model) are formal, codified instruments. Unwritten constitutions (as in the British model) consist of statutes, conventions, and common law principles accumulated over time.
2. Ecclesiastical Constitutions: Bodies of canon law promulgated by church councils, provincial synods, or papal legates. In English legal history, these include the constitutions of the provincial synods of Canterbury (Stephen Langton through Henry Chichele) and the legatine constitutions enacted under Cardinals Otho and Othobon. These were adopted formally within England and treated as binding ecclesiastical law.
3. Legatine Constitutions: A specific subset of ecclesiastical constitutions — decrees issued by papal legates operating in England, as distinguished from those enacted by domestic church councils alone.
Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in the Law Mind corpus face a significant disambiguation problem with this term. In any text predating the eighteenth century, CONSTITUTIONS appearing without qualification almost certainly refers to ecclesiastical or Roman-derived law, not to a national political charter. The modern default meaning — a sovereign governing document — only solidified as the dominant usage in the late eighteenth century, driven largely by the American and French constitutional moments.
For researchers in English legal history, the Constitutions of Clarendon (1164) are a particularly important instance: a set of royal decrees regulating the relationship between church and crown, neither purely ecclesiastical nor purely civil. They illustrate that CONSTITUTIONS could also describe royal legislation of a quasi-constitutional character, separate from both the synodal and modern political senses.
The legatine constitutions described by Rapalje & Lawrence — enacted under Otho (c. 1237) and Othobon (c. 1268) — were influential in English ecclesiastical courts for centuries and appear in legal commentaries well into the early modern period. Researchers encountering references to "Otho" or "Othobon" in ecclesiastical law contexts are almost certainly dealing with this body of constitutions.
Jurisdictional variation matters acutely for the modern sense: state constitutions in the United States can provide greater individual rights protections than the federal floor, and state constitutional law is a distinct research domain. A researcher who defaults to federal constitutional doctrine when consulting state court materials risks missing state-specific independent grounds.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary and Rapalje & Lawrence both focus exclusively on the ecclesiastical meaning, which reflects the orientation of nineteenth-century American legal dictionaries toward English ecclesiastical and common law heritage. Black's emphasizes the provincial synod constitutions under successive Archbishops of Canterbury — from Stephen Langton in Henry III's reign through Henry Chichele in Henry V's reign — and notes their adoption by the province of York under Henry VI. Rapalje & Lawrence focuses on the legatine constitutions specifically, tracing them to the reigns of Henry III and fixing approximate dates of 1220 and 1268. Both cite Wharton as authority.
Neither source addresses the modern political meaning at all, which is a significant gap from a contemporary research perspective. The omission is not an oversight but a product of period and purpose: these dictionaries were cataloguing technical terms with specific historical content, not general constitutional law concepts. Researchers should not read the absence of the modern meaning as authority for the narrow ecclesiastical definition — it reflects the dictionaries' scope, not the law.
The two sources agree on the core substance but differ in their framing: Black's organizes by the English provincial church structure; Rapalje & Lawrence centers on the legatine (papal) origin of the most prominent early constitutions. Both framings are accurate and complementary.
Jurisdictional Note
In United States research, federal and state constitutions operate on parallel tracks and neither is simply subordinate to the other across all domains. State courts interpreting their own constitutions on independent state grounds are not reviewable by federal courts on those state law questions. Researchers working across jurisdictions must identify which constitutional instrument — and which interpretive tradition — governs the materials at hand.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
Constitutional Avoidance — The Doctrine of Avoiding Constitutional Questions (Law Mind Constitutional Law Encyclopedia)