Tag: political constitutionalism
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Stephanie Reynolds: Elon Musk: Stretching or Snapping an Elastic Constitution?
Elon Musk has recently utilised his extensive platform as owner of social media site X to intervene in British politics. He has labelled the UK Prime Minister ‘two-tier Keir’ in relation to allegations of police bias against white protestors during the 2024 riots, and after the Government announced changes to inheritance tax, declared that ‘Britain…
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Iain Halliday: Political and Legal Constitutionalism in the Age of Supreme Court Referrals
Back in early 2013 I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the role of law and politics in the independence debate. I concluded that: “Throughout the independence debate, the law, in the form of judicial intervention, had no role to play. This can be seen as a victory for the political constitution. In the context of…
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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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Brian Christopher Jones: A single written UK constitution may only make things worse
Arguments for and against a single written (or ‘codified’) UK constitution often revolve around flexibility versus rigidity or transparency versus opacity. Recently, another common objection is that it would just be inconvenient, or impossible given the current levels of polarisation. These objections are reasonable and legitimate, but they are hardly the full extent of the…
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Mike Gordon: The Prorogation Case and the Political Constitution
The decision of the Supreme Court in Cherry / Miller (No.2) [2019] UKSC 41 has been heralded as a significant moment in our constitutional history, a case which will be regarded as a defining part of the fabric of our constitution for centuries to come. Whether it will live up to this billing is a…
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Richard Ekins: Reflections on Democracy’s Foundations
This is part of a series of posts in which Richard Ekins reflects upon Lord Sumption’s Reith Lectures. You can find the first posts here, here and here. In his fifth and final Reith lecture, broadcast yesterday morning and entitled “Shifting the Foundations”, Jonathan Sumption brings to a conclusion his reflections on “the decline of…
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Richard Ekins: Constitutional Lessons from America
This is part of a series of posts in which Richard Ekins reflects upon Lord Sumption’s Reith Lectures. You can find the first posts here and here. In his fourth Reith lecture, broadcast yesterday morning and entitled “Rights and the Ideal Constitution”, Jonathan Sumption turns to the American experience of struggling to reconcile democracy with…
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Graham Gee and Chris McCorkindale: The Political Constitution at 40
The constitution ‘is no more and no less than what happens’. So wrote Professor John Griffith in the 1978 Chorley Lecture, ‘The Political Constitution’, which was later republished in the Modern Law Review in 1979. It was not the first time that Griffith dangled this tantalizing aphorism before his readers, but it was this lecture…