Separation of Powers

June 10, 2013 8:56 AM

The subsection of the Colorado Constitution, “General Consideration” under Article III, Distribution of Powers, gives more than thirty-five examples of why and how separation of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government must be. They all seem to say the same thing, but they all are justified by different dictums, references and notations. Why, at least in Colorado and I suspect, in other states, is there the need for so much specificity as it relates to the republican tripartite system?
posted by CollectiveMind to Law & Government (4 answers total)

State constitutions need to be more specific that the national one because they have more work to do, since the Federal constitution pushes a lot of power down to them. A lot of them also include a lot of the common law that was generated between the enactment of the US constitution and their own.
posted by gjc at 9:09 AM on June 10, 2013

The original Colorado Constitution (8MB PDF) has none of those:

The powers of the government of this State are divided into three distinct departments -- the Legislative, Executive and Judicial -- and no person, or collection of persons, charged with the exercise of powers properly belonging to one of these departments, shall exercise any power properly belonging to either of the others, except as in this Constitution expressly directed or permitted.

That tells me that the examples are because of issues that came up since 1876 and have been codified so people won't run into those issues again.
posted by Etrigan at 9:09 AM on June 10, 2013

If you mean the part after this:

I. General Consideration.
II. Legislative Powers.
III. Executive Powers.
IV. Judicial Powers.


Those are notes of cases, etc. that interpret the constitution not the text of the actual constitution. They are added by Lexis to help with research.
posted by interplanetjanet at 9:59 AM on June 10, 2013 [3 favorites]

Here's a good explanation of annotated codes from UCLA law library http://libguides.law.ucla.edu/content.php?pid=43631&sid=322471. It is talking about annotated statutes but the same applies to annotated constitutions.
posted by interplanetjanet at 11:05 AM on June 10, 2013