Tag: Constitutional Statutes
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Edmund Robinson: Re Allister and the entrenchment ‘road not taken’: A rejoinder to Kacper Majewski
Kacper Majewski has written an excellent, thought-provoking, piece on the subject of constitutional statutes, in light of the Re Allister UK Supreme Court ruling. The UKSC may, he argues, have effectively rendered the ‘constitutional statute’ concept ‘legally redundant’. This may be correct, and there is certainly support for that position within the decision, but it is important to complete the…
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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Market Act 2020 (UKIMA) attracted a great deal of criticism, the majority of which was directed towards the – since withdrawn – provisions which purported to break international law (albeit apparently only in a limited and specific way).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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Kenneth Armstrong: Governing With or Without Consent – The United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020
The United Kingdom Internal Market Act has become law, receiving Royal Assent shortly before MPs and Lords departed the Palace of Westminster for the holidays. The controversial provisions in Part 5 conflicting with the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement and Northern Ireland Protocol – previously discussed by me here – have been removed following the outcome of…
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Jack Simson Caird and Ellis Paterson: Could the UK Courts Disapply Domestic Legislation to Enforce the Protocol on Ireland and Northern Ireland?
If the Withdrawal Agreement is approved, then Parliament will be asked to legislate to give domestic legal effect to its content through the EU (Withdrawal Agreement) Bill. One of the most significant provisions of the Withdrawal Agreement, Article 4, purports to give the entire contents of the Withdrawal Agreement special status within the UK’s constitutional…
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Mike Gordon: Parliamentary Sovereignty and the Implementation of the EU Withdrawal Agreement (Part II)
Editors’ note: This is the second part of a two-part contribution. The first part can be found here. Part one of this blog post considered the constitutional challenge potentially posed by the commitment in the Phase One Joint Report that the UK Parliament will enact a Withdrawal Agreement and Implementation Bill to give effect to…
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Mike Gordon: Parliamentary Sovereignty and the Implementation of the EU Withdrawal Agreement (Part I)
Editors’ note: This is the first of a two-part contribution. The second part will be posted tomorrow. The Brexit process continues to generate challenges for law, government and the constitution in the UK. The ‘Joint Report from the Negotiators of the European Union and the United Kingdom Government on Progress During Phase 1 of Negotiations…
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Paul Daly: EU Law in the UK after Brexit: EU Nationals’ Rights and a Transitional Period
With white smoke emerging from Berlaymont, and the UK and EU ready to move to Stage 2 of the Article 50 negotiations, it is time for UK public lawyers to start thinking very carefully about how norms of EU law can be enforced in a post-Brexit legal order. Paragraph 36 of the Joint report from…
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Thomas Fairclough: Privacy International: Constitutional Substance over Semantics in Reading Ouster Clauses
I have previously written on this blog and elsewhere about statutory interpretation and the rule of law. In the previous blog post I stated that the idea “that the courts will not allow the executive to escape their jurisdiction is well established as part of the rule of law” and referenced, inter alia, Anisminic Ltd…
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Raj Desai: Miller and the Flexibility of the UK Constitution
The Government placed considerable reliance on the flexibility of the UK constitution in its appeal to the Supreme Court in Miller, urging that this flexibility be employed to take full account of the factual and political context of the Brexit referendum in determining the legal questions before the court. In this post, I suggest that…
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Colin Harvey: Northern Ireland’s Transition and the Constitution of the UK
Constitutional Law in Context Context matters in law. Northern Ireland has a devolved executive and legislature; but the constitutional transition should not be viewed exclusively as a tale of devolution within the UK. To do so would be to neglect the particular circumstances, and thus risk perpetuating an impoverished understanding of constitutional change. The danger…