Constitution of Urcea
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The Apostolic Kingdom of Urcea does not have a codified constitution such as other countries tend to have. Instead of such a constitution, certain documents, precedents, and agreements stand to serve as replacements in lieu of one. These texts and their provisions therein are considered to be constitutional, such that the "constitution of Urcea" or "Urcean constitution" may refer to a number of historical and momentous laws and principles like the Concession of 1747 and the Great Bull of 1811 which formulate the country's body politic. Thus the term "Urcean constitution" is sometimes said to refer to an "unwritten" or uncodified constitution. The Urcean constitution primarily draws from five sources: statute law (laws passed by the Conshilía Daoni as best summarized in the Consolidated Laws of HMCM's Kingdom and State), common law (laws established through court judgments), procedural conventions of the Conshilía Daoni and Conshilía Purpháidhe, works of Royal authority (such as Royal decrees or concessions made by the Apostolic King of Urcea to the Conshilía Daoni), and least frequently, canon law. Similar to a constitutional document, it also concerns both the relationship between the individual and the state and the functioning of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary.
Since the era of the Caroline Wars and the early modern period, the concept of "shared sovereignty", between the King as one party and the people through the councils as the other party, has been the bedrock of the Urcean legislative constitution. The statutes passed by the Conshilía Daoni and Conshilía Purpháidhe are the binding source of law in the Apostolic Kingdom. The Constitution can thus by changed by the Councils with some final input from the King, as binding constitutional advice does not, and Constitutionally cannot, apply to changes to the Constitution.
As an unwritten constitution, considerable amounts of the Constitution exist in precedent or Mos maiorum, similar to Caphiria; in many respects, however, its broad outlines can be found written in the Consolidated Laws of HMCM's Kingdom and State.
Development
Constitutional theory
The fundamental underlying of the Constitution of Urcea is the concept of shared sovereignty, by which sovereignty originates from the King but is fully shared in by the people. Philosophers disagree on the basic structure and underpinnings of this theory. Crown Liberals argue that, although the institutions of democratic governance predate even the establishment of the kingdom with the Golden Bull of 1098, the philosophical basis of the rights and public participation are that of a free grant of the Apostolic King of Urcea. This model comes to its summit in the Great Bull of 1811. The "free grant" model, viewed by scholars and lawyers as irrevocable, is not, in the words of P. G. W. Gelema, "a one time dispensation of Royal rights but a continued generation of access to participation of popular will in the machinery of government". Consequently, some scholars have gone as far as to say that the Apostolic King in his person, under this model, is the Constitution, although this formula is not widely used.
Despite the purported centrality of the King within the Constitution, organicists have noted that the self-conception of government has developed as a result of the shared sovereignty model which could only develop from a society as a whole, as organicists argue, rather than an individual historical event (as in the grant model). Despite the origins of the Julian Throne as one of an innumerable amount of monarchies based on feudal estate rights within the Holy Levantine Empire, it evolved into a model absorbing earlier concepts of both Great Levantia and the Gaelic people.
In both models, the King is viewed as the father of the nation in the sense of actual kinship, best displayed by his role at the head of the Estates of Urcea, which is the evolution of both Gaelic and Latinic views on tribal relationships. While sovereign in himself, the King's responsibilities to the Kingdom are modeled on the responsibility of magistrates of Great Levantia, placing the King in the role of an office holder.