Organic law
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An organic law or fundamental law is a law or system of laws, that forms the foundation of a government, corporation or other organization's body of rules. A constitution is a particular form of organic law for a sovereign state.
[edit] Organic laws in France
See also the loi organique article, in French
Under the current Constitution of France, organic laws are a short, fixed list of statutes (as of 2005, there are about 30 of them) whose existence is provisioned by the text of the Constitution itself. Those special statutes are of constitutional scope according to the framing of the French Constitution (especially its preambles) and also have constitutional force. This means that they overrule ordinary statutes, despite their being enacted by the Parliament of France in the same way — except that the Constitutional Council of France is unconditionally consulted before any organic law is enacted.
This mechanism allows the French Constitution to provide flexibility where needed. Dispositions such as the legislative process for enacting the budgets of the French state and French social security, as well as the practical procedures for the various elections, are delegated to organic laws, which tends to make the constitution itself less prone to change.
