Jump to content

Constitutional court

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Thijs!bot (talk | contribs) at 07:47, 26 September 2008 (robot Adding: nl:Constitutioneel hof). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Austrian Constitutional Court (Verfassungsgerichtshof, VfGH), building of the former Böhmische Hofkanzlei, Judenplatz 11 in Vienna
Bundesverfassungsgericht (BVerfG) in Karlsruhe
File:Konstsud.jpg
Constitutional court of Russia (architect Marian Peretiatkovich, 1912).

A constitutional court is a high court that deals primarily with constitutional law. Its main authority is to rule on whether or not laws that are challenged are in fact unconstitutional, i.e. whether or not they conflict with constitutionally established rights and freedoms.

The list in this article is of countries that have a separate constitutional court. Many countries do not have separate constitutional courts, but instead delegate constitutional judicial authority to their supreme court. Nonetheless, such courts are sometimes also called "constitutional courts"; for example, some have called the Supreme Court of the United States "the world's oldest constitutional court" because it was the first court in the world to invalidate a law as unconstitutional (Marbury v. Madison), even though it is not a separate constitutional court. Austria established the world's first separate constitutional court in 1920 (though it was suspended, along with the constitution that created it, from 1934 to 1945); before that, only the U.S. and Australia had adopted the concept of judicial review through their supreme courts.

Countries with separate constitutional courts include:

Column-generating template families

The templates listed here are not interchangeable. For example, using {{col-float}} with {{col-end}} instead of {{col-float-end}} would leave a <div>...</div> open, potentially harming any subsequent formatting.

Column templates
Type Family
Handles wiki
table code?
Responsive/
mobile suited
Start template Column divider End template
Float "col-float" Yes Yes {{col-float}} {{col-float-break}} {{col-float-end}}
"columns-start" Yes Yes {{columns-start}} {{column}} {{columns-end}}
Columns "div col" Yes Yes {{div col}} {{div col end}}
"columns-list" No Yes {{columns-list}} (wraps div col)
Flexbox "flex columns" No Yes {{flex columns}}
Table "col" Yes No {{col-begin}},
{{col-begin-fixed}} or
{{col-begin-small}}
{{col-break}} or
{{col-2}} .. {{col-5}}
{{col-end}}

Can template handle the basic wiki markup {| | || |- |} used to create tables? If not, special templates that produce these elements (such as {{(!}}, {{!}}, {{!!}}, {{!-}}, {{!)}})—or HTML tags (<table>...</table>, <tr>...</tr>, etc.)—need to be used instead.

Footnotes