Category: Comparative law
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Dane Luo: R (Jwanczuk) v Work and Pensions Secretary: Bringing a Comparative Lens to Judicial Precedent on Inter-jurisdictional Laws
The Supreme Court will hear the appeal in R (Jwanczuk) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (UKSC/2023/0152) on 11 and 12 March 2025. One of the issues is the circumstances in which courts in England and Wales may depart from decisions of appellate courts in Northern Ireland and Scotland regarding laws of inter-jurisdictional…
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Tarun Khaitan: A Fourth Branch of the State? On Constitutional Guarantors in the UK
It is believed to be one of the chief merits of the American system of written constitutional law, that all the powers intrusted to government, whether State or national, are divided into the three grand departments, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. Kilbourn v Thompson (1881) 103 US 168, 190 (emphasis added) In its…
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Jeremy Ogilvie-Harris: A Comparative Perspective on the Constitutionality of Clause 9 of the Nationality and Borders Bill
Introduction The Nationality and Borders Bill (NABB) proposes controversial amendments to the UK’s citizenship deprivation power under s. 40 British Nationality Act 1981 (BNA). The Home Secretary seeks a power to dispense with the requirement to give notice of deprivation decisions to those affected, in an act of “striking back” (Harlow and Rawlings at Chamberlain J’s…
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Max Taylor: Parliamentary Confirmation of Ministerial Nominations
In terms of government formation, there are two kinds of parliamentary system: “…countries where the government needs to win an investiture vote are said to have positive parliamentarism, while countries in which the government just needs to be tolerated by parliament are said to have negative parliamentarism”. By this definition, the UK has a negative parliamentary…
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Eliza Bechtold: The Republican Party’s Misappropriation of ‘Free Speech’ Undermines American Democracy
Following the insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January, several Republican lawmakers accused the press and social media companies of censorship and attempting to ‘cancel’ conservative voices. During Trump’s impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives the following week, Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene gave a nationally televised speech in the House Chamber wearing…
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Guy Baldwin: The Pandemic and the First Amendment
Against the backdrop of the coronavirus pandemic still raging, the US Supreme Court recently weighed in on the interaction between public health measures and the First Amendment to the US Constitution. The Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, imposed, by Executive Order, occupancy limits on houses of worship in designated zones. On 25 November 2020,…
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Atina Krajewska: The judgment of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal on abortion: a dark day for Poland, for Europe, and for democracy
On 22nd October 2020, the Polish Constitutional Tribunal (CT) held unconstitutional a statutory legal provision, which had previously allowed women to access abortion on the grounds of fatal foetal abnormality. The provision under review, Article 4a para 1 (2) of the Act for Family Planning and the Protection of the Foetus (1993), had decriminalised abortion…
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Jan van Zyl Smit and Aradhya Sethia: Partial Codification of Administrative Law: What are the Rule of Law Opportunities and Risks of the IRAL’s Remit? Part Two
This is Part Two of a post examining the Rule of Law opportunities and risks arising from the IRAL’s remit, in light of comparative experience from the codification of administrative law in other common law jurisdictions. In Part One, we considered the implications for some of the constituent principles of the Rule of Law under…
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Jan van Zyl Smit and Aradhya Sethia: Partial Codification of Administrative Law: What are the Rule of Law Opportunities and Risks of the IRAL’s Remit? Part One
The Independent Review of Administrative Law (IRAL), which is holding a short, seven-week consultation that will close on 26 October 2020, has a remit to consider whether parts of UK administrative law should be codified. Codification usually presents both opportunities and risks for the Rule of Law. The opportunity arises from the fact that codifying…