In practice I'm not sure it makes much difference. Mostly constitutions, charters of rights and freedoms, or whatever are full of wonderful phrases about manki

In practice I'm not sure it makes much difference. Mostly constitutions, charters of rights and freedoms, or whatever are full of wonderful phrases about mankind. Especially if you get somebody good like Thomas Paine to write it. But it's the courts that decide if abortion is allowed and reject claims that smoking bans go against magna carta. There are also administrative uses - the constitution sets down how often elections happen and who succeeds who. But if you are a 'nice' country that abides by that constitution then you would also presumably abide by the historical convention that the Queen picks the prime minister with the most seats in the house - even if that isn't written down. If McArthur had decided to seize Washington in a military coup then a Constitution isn't physically going to stop him (that's what the marine corp is for!) Similarly in Russia the new democratic constitution stopped Putin serving another term - but it didn't stop him putting a puppet in place.