Tag: Parliamentary sovereignty
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Anurag Deb: Privacy International: A Matter of Constitutional Logic and Judicial Trust?
Introduction The High Court and Court of Appeal decisions in Privacy International v IPT have ignited the debate on the ‘validity’ or otherwise of ouster clauses in the UK constitution (see analyses in the Admin Law Blog and the UKCLA Blog). At one end is the argument that ouster clauses prevent the correction of legal…
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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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Thomas Fairclough: What’s New About the Rule of Law? A Reply to Michal Hain
This blog recently published a detailed piece by Michal Hain. He made some very interesting claims that this note will examine. I start by explaining Hain’s arguments and ordering them roughly according to the way they come out in his piece. I then examine each in greater detail giving my own views. Finally, I will…
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Michal Hain: Guardians of the Constitution – the Constitutional Implications of a Substantive Rule of Law
A constitutional storm is brewing. Whilst it is too early to perform the burial rites for parliamentary sovereignty, the Supreme Court’s decisions in R (UNISON) v Lord Chancellor [2017] UKSC 51 and R (Evans) v Attorney-General [2015] UKSC 21 are the beginning of the end of the principle’s unrivalled reign. Two especially thorny constitutional issues…
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George Letsas: The Constitution and the Folly of Majoritarianism
In the aftermath of the EU Referendum many hoped that Parliament will, in its wisdom, block what the people decided to do in the heat of the moment: to leave the EU in a single ‘in-out’ referendum, with a simple majority, in a campaign full of deliberate lies and misinformation. That hope remained alive when…
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Oliver Garner: Conditional Primacy of EU Law: The United Kingdom Supreme Court’s Own “Solange (so long as)” Doctrine?
In circumstances of “normal” membership of the European Union, the UK Supreme Court’s dicta in the Miller judgment that EU law is an “independent and overriding source of domestic law” [Paragraph 65] may well have caused a constitutional storm. In the current unprecedented tempest of Brexit, however, Lord Neuberger’s announcement of this statement passed as…
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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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Mikolaj Barczentewicz: Uses and Misuses of the Rule of Recognition in Miller
The jurisprudential concept of the rule of recognition featured several times during the Miller hearings at the Supreme Court. In this short note, I discuss three uses of the concept of the rule of recognition during the Miller hearings and propose one other way in which the concept is relevant to Miller, that was not…
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Thomas Poole: Losing our Religion? Public Law and Brexit
Prerogative is the enemy of the people. This has been settled as matter of law for a very long time. The constitutional settlement of 1688 made a decision for responsible and representative government. We have had no constitutional moment of similar magnitude since. All constitutional changes – some very significant – have taken place within…