 The constitutional law is a paper normally studied in the first year of an Undergraduate Law course. It's the law which establishes state institutions, allocates functions to each of them, confers on them appropriate duties and powers, regulates their exercise of the functions and regulates the relationships between them. Constitutional laws may do other things as well, but organising institutions is is the essential task of constitutional law in any state. It's worth drawing attention particularly to four points about this, which reflect the kinds of issues with which you'll have to grapple when you study constitutional law. First, the organisation of the state and so constitutional law is a process, it's not a fixed body of rules. As states develop, constitutional law has to be dynamic, not static, it has to develop with them. This applies to all constitutions. Second point, law isn't the only system which contributes to organising the state institutions. There are non-legal customs, political and administrative agreements, memoranda of understanding, codes of practice intergovernmental concordats, a sheer force of circumstances all play their part. Indeed, the law itself is a product of the interaction between those forces. Thirdly, constitutional law is one of the foundations of all law. Among the institutions which it helps to establish are those with power to make law legislatures and who are authorised to implement and enforce it. One might say that constitutional law is the law relating to government and the making and operation of law, while other types of law are concerned mainly with the behaviour of people and non-governmental organisations. Fourthly, there are some activities which are commonly thought to be associated with constitutions but are not necessarily part of constitutional law. It need not, for example, be concerned with people's rights, although in some states people's rights are regarded as limits on the competences of at least some state institutions. And in those contexts one can say that the law relating to rights is part of constitutional law. Constitutional law, again, need not require or provide for any kind of democracy, although in some states some form or other of democracy is adopted as a way to select people to staff the institutions or as a way of making decisions affecting the scope and discharge of institutions' responsibilities. Again, constitutional law need not be, and normally is not, contained comprehensively in a single document called the constitution. There often is such a document and it's very likely to contain a number of provisions of constitutional law, but it can never contain all of them. It will often contain some provisions which are not in the sense that I've been describing, constitutional provisions. So when we study constitutional law we have to understand the legal rules governing state institutions and their functions, but we also have to understand how legal rules interact with political and administrative standards, practices and understandings which, in combination with the law, help to ensure that state power is exercised in a transparent and accountable manner.