Category: England
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Antonia Layard: Darwall and the Public Life of Private Property
When wealthy landowners, Alexander and Diana Darwall, sued a national park authority to stop people pitching their tents on the Dartmoor Commons, few expected the dispute to take a constitutional turn. Yet this was the outcome of Darwall v Dartmoor National Park Authority[2025] UKSC 20, where the Supreme Court’s decisive rejection of the landowners’ claims…
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Tasneem Ghazi: Political Accountability for the Abuse of Guidance: Comparing English and Irish Guidance during the Coronavirus Lockdown
*Editors’ note – this post is part of a series on ‘The Rule of Guidance?’. The other posts in the series will be available here. Introduction In March 2020, the government of Ireland and the UK government exercising its responsibility for England, like others across the world, rushed to impose wide-ranging restrictions on many facets of…
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Isabel Taylor: Not So Arcane After All: Archives and the Battle for ‘Ancient Freedoms’ in the Stuart Permanent State of Emergency
In popular consciousness, archivists (when noticed at all, and not confused with Indiana Jones) are usually otherworldly, whey-faced individuals poring shortsightedly over mediaeval tomes, their institutional domains obscure, dusty spaces with little connection to the ‘real world.’ The central role of archives as repositories for important legal records is thereby often overlooked, but this function…
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Mark K Heatley: The Implications of the Hertfordshire County Council Case for Local Democracy
The High Court recently delivered its judgment in the case of Hertfordshire County Council v Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, finding that remote meetings of local councils could not continue after 7 May 2021. This article looks at the decision and considers its impact for future local democracy. In England council…
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Mikołaj Barczentewicz: Should Cart Judicial Reviews be Abolished? Empirically Based Response
The Government adopted a recommendation of the Independent Review of Administrative Law that Cart judicial reviews should be abolished. The reasons given by the Review for that recommendation have been criticised on this blog by Joe Tomlinson & Alison Pickup and by Joanna Bell. The Review (and the Government) claimed that there is only a…
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Jonathan Collinson: Redesigning English Football: Lessons from Constitutional Law Scholarship
One of the few objectively true statements about life is that, ‘The thing about football – the important thing about football – is that it is not just about football’. This maxim has been proven true over the last week, as twelve global football brands (previously and unfashionable called ‘football clubs’) announced their intention to create a new European Super…
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Joanna Bell: Digging for Information about Cart JRs
Anyone who has ever tried to study judicial review in England and Wales empirically knows it is a little like digging for gold without a metal detector: it is difficult to know where to dig and there is also no guarantee that you will find what you are looking for. In a characteristically well-argued and…
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Joe Tomlinson and Alison Pickup: Putting the Cart before the horse? The Confused Empirical Basis for Reform of Cart Judicial Reviews
The Independent Review of Administrative Law has now reported. For a review process that was unnecessarily quick, the Expert Panel, led by Lord Faulks QC, has produced a substantial and detailed analysis. The Report has rightly drawn broad support from across the political spectrum—even if the Government’s support for the report has been accompanied by…
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Paul Craig: IRAL: The Panel Report and the Government’s Response
The Report of the Independent Review of Administrative Law, IRAL, was made public on 16 March. It stretches to 195 pages in total, although one third of this comprises annexes and the like. This blog considers the Report of the Panel and the government response. The Panel Report The IRAL Panel is refreshingly open and…
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Mikołaj Barczentewicz: An empirical study of the gender of counsel before the UK’s highest court.
During the live television coverage of the Supreme Court hearings in Miller (No 1), some commentators (and no doubt many members of the public) noted that almost all lawyers in the courtroom were male. That image of the UK’s “Supreme Court bar” (to borrow a US term), though not entirely accurate, highlighted an ongoing problem…