Constitutions

There's an old joke that says God is an Englishman. The strange thing is that there are many similarities between the British and Jewish constitutions ( except us Jews would claim that the basis of our constitution comes from God via Moses our teacher).

Let's look at this in more detail. 

The first thing the ignorant will tell you is that Britain has no written constitution, unlike America's famous one which can fit into the back of any politics textbook and still get into a rucksack. In fact saying Britain doesn't have a written constitution isn't true. Britain doesn't have a codified constitution, i.e. it is NOT written down in one singular document to fit neatly into a textbook and did not come about in one particular year , instead coming about throughout the centuries into what we have today. Some of it is written, some of it is oral and some of it is convention or tradition and some of it has been imposed by the EU. But it has come about over time. Similarly both the British and Jewish legal framework rely on precedent and convention.

Likewise, the halakha has a mixture of written (the Torah of Moses) , oral (the oral Torah eventually written into the Talmud) and custom and tradition  or convention (Minhag). The oral law of the Talmud often contains commentary by Rabbis of a later date; you will almost certainly get a commentary from Rashi at minimum, but sometimes commentary on commentary from various Rabbinical sources throughout the ages. 

But you may ask what about codification ? True the two most well known sources which sought  to codify Halakha , both  of whom come via our Sephardic middle eastern Rabbinical scholars : Moses Maimonides( the Rambam) and Joseph Caro ( the Maran).  Of course  us Ashkenazi took these and modified them and (to Sephardic eyes) made them grossly over complex and legalistic, by adding to them ,but that's a different story. Similarly , Britain has Walter Bagheot and Erskin May.

But what's important is that they both work , have grown organically rather than mechanically and stand the test of time.