Mohamed ElBaradei, the former UN nuclear chief whose principled attacks on Mr Mubarak helped launch Egypt's revolution, abandoned a hoped-for presidential bid because in the absence of a constitution the race, he said, would be open to manipulation.
This threat is used to justify the absence of a constitution, the destruction of the judicial system, and the implementation of indefinite national service that allows the government to treat each civilian as a modern-day serf for their whole life.
The absence of a constitution, combined with Israel's fractious politics, left a vacuum of authority that Israel's Supreme Court, under its activist former chief justice, Aharon Barak, filled by interpreting certain "basic laws" as quasi-constitutional.Unusually, Israel's Supreme Court is also a court of first instance for claims against the state.
And doesn't Begin's endearing yet misguided insistence on minute procedures in the absence of a constitution lead to the impasse strategy of the progressive Meretz Party today?
Given the absence of a written constitution, I doubt whether most people have the slightest idea what this means.
But exactly what they are, in the absence of a codified constitution, must be open to doubt.
In the absence of a written constitution, the act and the convention are the bedrock of our democracy based on the rule of law.
New York State supports the St . Regis Mohawk Tribal Council which comprises three elected chiefs but has always been under suspicion because of the absence of a written constitution.
In the absence of a written constitution, we still rely far too heavily in the UK on unwritten and unenforceable "constitutional conventions".
Given the absence of a written constitution, it seems very hard to identify with clarity and consistency the circumstances in which the courts could take such a course.
