Tag: Northern Ireland Act 1998
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Anurag Deb: The Unquiet Irish Border Problem: Implications in the Aftermath of the Withdrawal Act
On 26 June 2018, the hitherto hotly-debated European Union (Withdrawal) Bill became an Act of Parliament (“2018 Act”) after a tennis match of amendments and counter-amendments between Parliament’s two Houses. Much has been said by leading academics about the contents of the 2018 Act both during its stormy passage through Parliament and after its enactment…
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Anne Smith and Colin Harvey: Continuing the Conversation about a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland
The long journey towards a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland continues. It is being referred to again in the current negotiations as an unimplemented element of earlier Agreements. We are taking forward a project funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust with the aim of reflecting on the next steps. With this in mind…
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Conor Crummey: The Duty to Protect the Irish Language and the Use of Declaratory Relief in Northern Ireland
The past year in Northern Irish politics has seen a drive for greater recognition and promotion of the Irish language pushed up the political agenda. Demands for the introduction of an Irish Language Act only increased in the face of rather scornful rhetoric by the Democratic Unionist Party; and the revelation that a public funding…
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Graham John Wheeler: Referendums That Time Forgot
It is well known that the first national referendum in the UK was the 1975 poll on EEC membership. It is also quite well known that A.V. Dicey called for the introduction of the referendum into British politics from the 1880s onwards as a means of defeating Irish home rule. This episode was the subject…
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Kenneth Campbell QC: How Devolution Has Altered Some Fundamentals of the British Constitution
Introduction Regular readers of this blog will need no reminding of how much anticipation has been devoted to the Art 50 litigations ahead of and and during the UK Government’s appeal to the UK Supreme Court, in what has been by turns both an attempt to work out the boundaries of the constitution, and a…
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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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Robert Craig: Report of Proceedings: Miller v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, Supreme Court, Day 3
Introduction This post aims to summarise the highlights of the Supreme Court (SC) hearing on Day 3 (7 December 2016) of the hearings in the Miller v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union case. As mentioned in previous posts, and as with the reports on the High Court (HC), this report will not…
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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…
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Jeff King and Nick Barber: In Defence of Miller
Miller v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union has stimulated quite a bit of debate. Some criticism of the decision has been well-informed and thoughtful, whilst some of it has been, to put it charitably, less worthy of engagement. In this post we respond to what we view as the strongest arguments against…