Constitutional Codification

What is the value of constitutional codification? Are there benefits to writing down a constitution when it is unwritten? This question is alive in the UK where the constitution is not written down in any one document which declares itself as ‘the constitution,’ unlike much of the rest of the world. It was also alive for a time in the European Union, which tried unsuccessfully to integrate the most important provisions of existing treaties into a new Constitutional Treaty for the European Union, which failed to be ratified by all countries in 2005. And it is also alive in any constitutional system with an already written constitution, which considers amendments, i.e. adding or removing clauses to the constitution. What does writtenness as such add to a constitutional system, that cannot be accomplished via regular statutes or other forms of law-making, and what does codification tells us about the functions constitutions play at the national and transnational levels? These are the main questions of this article.