Tag: Parliamentary sovereignty
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Sam Fowles: Cherry/Miller: What’s Next?
Yesterday the Supreme Court handed down its unanimous judgement in Cherry and Others v The Advocate General and Miller v the Prime Minister. The court found that the Prime Minister’s decision to prorogue parliament was unlawful and, consequently, null and void. This article aims to identify some of the immediate constitutional and political impacts of…
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Alex Green: Our Constitution, Accountability and the Limits of the Power to Prorogue
Constitutions do many things. They distribute authority amongst public bodies, enshrine important points of substantive principle, and cement relationships between rulers and the ruled. However, in a more abstract and fundamental sense, constitutions also tell us something about ourselves as political collectives: they express the kind of polity we embody and the kind of people…
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Simon Lee: The Supremes’ Seventh: Dominant or Diminished?
Seven points about the Supreme Court judgment in Miller II/Cherry are in danger of being missed amidst the political noise. The tone of our reception of the Justices’ seventh paragraph, in particular, could determine whether there is any way of finding constitutional harmony in our democracy. First, Tuesday’s summary of the unanimous, unambiguous, unequivocal and powerful judgment…
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Danny Nicol: Supreme Court Against the People
The chorus that the United Kingdom Supreme Court’s decision on prorogation (R. (on the application of Miller) v The Prime Minister; Cherry and others v. Advocate General for Scotland [2019] UKSC 41) has “nothing to do with Brexit” cannot withstand serious scrutiny. The British electorate’s decision to leave the European Union is the pivot around…
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Stephen Tierney: Prorogation and the Courts: A Question of Sovereignty
The request made by the Privy Council that the Queen prorogue Parliament was a clumsy and inappropriate attempt to shorten the time available for parliamentary scrutiny of the Brexit process. That much seems clear from papers submitted to the Court of Session in Cherry. It is therefore no surprise that the Inner House was receptive…
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Hasan Dindjer: Prorogation as a Breach of Parliamentary Sovereignty
Does proroguing Parliament under the present circumstances breach the principle of parliamentary sovereignty? The Divisional Court in Miller v Prime Minister (‘Miller (No 2)’) thought not. It held that the principle is not wide enough to be threatened by prorogation ([63]-[64]). I argue here that this conclusion rests on too narrow a view of parliamentary…
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Hayley J. Hooper: Keeping the Lights On: Contrasting Miller v Prime Minister and Cherry v The Advocate General
If the phrase “may you live in interesting times” actually has its roots in a curse, then, we constitutional lawyers are indeed cursed. The specific nature of the curse is the malleable nature of constitutional controls designed to protect our institutions from the whims of executive action. At the time of writing, Britain is set…
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Philip Allott: On the Merits of Constitutional Struggle
The current dramatic interaction between the Government, Parliament and the courts means that we are witnessing one of those formative moments in the evolution of our constitution of which there have been many over the course of centuries. The attention that is paid to the checks and balances of the US written constitution has tended…
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Ewan McGaughey: Is There a ‘Legal Measure’ to Judge Parliament’s Prorogration?
A central theme of the High Court judgment in Miller v Prime Minister is that there is ‘no legal measure by which the court could form a proper judgment on’ the matter of whether prorogation was excessive to prepare for the Queen’s Speech (at [56]). It was also said to be ‘impossible for the court…
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Paul Craig: Prorogation: Three Assumptions
Litigation is often predicated on certain assumptions. These may be the result of argumentation of the parties, the reasoning of the courts or an admixture of the two. The assumptions can take on an axiomatic character, and become ‘unchallengeable’. They may be regarded as expressive of uncontroversial facts, or perceived as inherent in the nature…