Tag: Common Law Constitutional Rights
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Alexander Baxter: Common Law Post-ECHR: What Lord Briggs’ Anniversary Lecture Tells Us
Introduction At the 25th Anniversary Conference of the Human Rights Act, Lord Briggs of Westbourne delivered a lecture that quietly advanced a vision of what a post-HRA constitutional framework might look like. Delivered at a moment when political discussion of withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights has gained real momentum, the speech did…
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Conor Crummey: The Principle of Legality, the Definition of ‘Terrorism’, and Palestine Action
Two judgments have so far been handed down in the matter of R (Ammori) v Secretary of State for the Home Department; the challenge to the Home Secretary’s decision to proscribe Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation under the Terrorism Act 2000 (‘the 2000 Act’). The first was on the matter of interim relief, which…
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Richard Brant and Lauren Butler: Reform UK’s Plans for “Getting Tough on Illegal Immigration”: From Legal Reset to Sunset
On 26 August 2025 Nigel Farage (Leader of Reform UK) and Zia Yusuf (now Head of Policy at Reform UK) unveiled their plan titled, ‘Operation Restoring Justice’. Key points from the plan were also reiterated at the Next Step Conference on 05 September 2025. Reform UK address the topic of immigration in their plan, adding…
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Alex Benn: In Crisis: the ‘Constitutional’ Right to Jury Trial
The ‘Executive Summary’ of the report of Brian Leveson’s Independent Review of the Criminal Courts: Part 1 opens with a description of a crisis. Criminal justice is in crisis. The open caseload in the Crown Court has now reached a record high. As of December 2024, there were over 75,000 outstanding cases in the Crown…
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Jeevan Hariharan: The Changing Face of Horizontal Effect
On 10 March, Lord Sales delivered the Cambridge Freshfields Annual Law Lecture on the topic of ‘constitutional values in the common law of obligations’. The lecture, which has not been discussed so far on this blog, seeks to explain how constitutional values familiar from the world of public law (such as freedom of expression, liberty…
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Christian Magaard: Reconciling the Proactive Principle of Legality with Parliamentary Sovereignty
*Editors’ note: This post is part of a series on ‘The Human Rights Act After 22 Years’, following the SLS Annual Seminar held in November 2022. You can read the first post in the series here. Rising like an arguably rather dark phoenix from the ashes, the Bill of Rights Bill now appears back on the legislative agenda. Yet…