Organic law
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.
See also the loi organique article, in FrenchUnder 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 â€" 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.
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Organic statute
