alt Hacker NewsWhat you say seems true. But a comment - there are more effective ways to achieve it than a bill of rights. Australia doesn’t have a bill of rights but does have decent due process, as a result of deliberate legislation. The bill of rights leads to the US Supreme Court being highly politicised because it is a nasty undemocratic backdoor to synthetic legislation. Australia does not have a politicised high court.
I'm Canadian, and as a fellow commonwealth citizen I don't think relying on common law precedent is stable. The common law, after all, is just whatever a judge says it is, and judges can be bought or unduly influenced.
As we're seeing in the United States, the Rule of Law itself is being fundamentally eroded. Laws in the USA are worth essentially nothing now, because the Executive Branch is brazenly and openly ignoring the law and Congress is either too inept or too corrupt to do anything about it. That culture of lawlessness is not going to just go away. It's already started and will continue to "trickle down".
What's more, neither the USA nor either of our countries are immune from political appointment of justices, and it's my understanding that Australia has in fact had some supreme court justices who were previously parliamentarians (sorry if these are not the correct terms), so that seems politically-motivated to me. The USA is merely ahead of us in crumbling, but I think we're in trouble too because their fucked-up political culture is so insidious in its spreading.
We've seen similar in Britain, with its much-vaunted "uncodified constitution". These systems, much like the common law itself, only work when everyone's more or less on the same page.
But when you have an entire political party that revels in shattering constitutional/governmental norms and conventions to the detriment of its perceived political enemies, the whole system gets ugly real quick.