Tag: Constitutional Principles
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Ronan Cormacain: Blue-eyed Babies, Amnesties, Sovereignty of Parliament and the Rule of Law: The Northern Ireland Legacy Proposals
Could Parliament pass a law that all blue-eyed babies be murdered? This was the hypothetical question posed by Stephen in the Science of Ethics, quoted by AV Dicey in the Introduction to the Study of The Constitution. Dicey agreed with the answer that “legislators must go mad before they could pass such a law, and…
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Michael Foran: Parliamentary Sovereignty and the Politics of Law-making
Parliamentary sovereignty has traditionally been understood to mean that Parliament is free to enact legislation on any area of law that it chooses, and that Acts of the U.K. Parliament take precedence over subordinate legislation, regulation, or common law rule. Understood this way, parliamentary sovereignty is a constitutional principle that is couched explicitly in legal…
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Jacob Eisler: Voter ID and the Elections Bill 2021: Legislative Manipulation of Democratic Procedure and the Limits of Judicial Review
The Elections Bill 2021, as of the date of publication for the House of Commons Committee stage, advances a variety of changes to the regulation of elections and the practice of voting in the UK. Of the reforms, one controversially reshapes the practical experience of voting for most citizens. A new voter ID requirement will…
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Nicholas Kilford: The UK Internal Market Act’s Interaction with Senedd Competences: The Welsh Government’s Challenge
On its passage through Parliament, the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 (UKIMA) attracted a great deal of criticism, the majority of which was directed towards the – since withdrawn – provisions which purported to break international law (albeit apparently only in a limited and specific way). Another, perhaps initially overshadowed, criticism, now coming to…
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Adam Perry: Enforcing Principles, Enforcing Conventions
Did the UK Supreme Court enforce a constitutional convention in Miller (No 2)? Most writers say no. I say yes. Miller (No 2) I won’t go through the case in detail. For my purposes three points matter. First, the UKSC says that there is a constitutional ‘principle of Parliamentary accountability’. It gives three examples of…
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Timothy Endicott: ‘This Ancient, Secretive Royal Prerogative’
That was Gina Miller’s evocative phrase for the power of the Crown when she was interviewed on Radio 4 before the hearing in her case, R (on the application of Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union [2016] EWHC 2768. An ancient secretive royal prerogative sounds like the personal privilege of a despot…
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John Adenitire: Exiting the EU Constitutionally
In Miller v Secretary of State [2016], the High Court held that the Government cannot use its prerogative power to initiate the withdrawal of the UK from the EU. In doing so, the High Court rejected every single argument that the Government put to it asserting the existence of the prerogative power. The main reason…
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Colm O’Cinneide: Why Parliamentary Approval for the Triggering of Article 50 TEU Should Be Required as a Matter of Constitutional Principle
The argument that Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) cannot be lawfully triggered without the consent of Parliament has generated plenty of excited discussion over the last week, both in specialist legal circles and in the wider world. The announcement by Mishcon de Reya that that legal action was pending to ‘ensure…
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Colin Harvey: Reconstructing the ‘Political Constitution’ of Northern Ireland
For reasons that are not difficult to grasp, the constitutional process in Northern Ireland has been marked by fragility and instability. The entity ‘Northern Ireland’ – carved out in the early 1920s – rested on insecure foundations and struggled to establish legitimacy. It was a constitutional creation mapped onto stark ‘facts on the ground’, embedded…
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Stuart Lakin: What Role Should Judges Play in the Constitution Justice Sumption?
In his recent F.A. Mann lecture Jonathan Sumption Q.C., the newly appointed member of the Supreme Court, took up the question of the proper role of judges vis-a-vis the political branches of government in the UK. Tom Adams has already provided a fine summary and analysis of the lecture in his January post. I urge…