Tag: UK Supreme Court
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Jamie Burton: When Is Guidance Unlawful on the Ground of Illegality?
*Editors’ note – this post is part of a series on ‘The Rule of Guidance?’. The other posts in the series will be available here. The seemingly ever-growing expanse of “soft-law”, “policy” or “guidance”, (referred to below as “guidance”) has been cautiously welcomed as aiding the business of government and enhancing good public administration. Unsurprisingly, as…
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Dane Luo: R (Jwanczuk) v Work and Pensions Secretary: Bringing a Comparative Lens to Judicial Precedent on Inter-jurisdictional Laws
The Supreme Court will hear the appeal in R (Jwanczuk) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions (UKSC/2023/0152) on 11 and 12 March 2025. One of the issues is the circumstances in which courts in England and Wales may depart from decisions of appellate courts in Northern Ireland and Scotland regarding laws of inter-jurisdictional…
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Iain Jamieson: Altering the Effect of Section 28(7) of the Scotland Act 1998
This article suggests that the Supreme Court’s interpretation of section 28(7) has created such problems in relation to the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament that the provision needs to be amended, repealed or qualified. Text The terms of section 28(7) appear innocuous. Section 28(1) confers power on the Scottish Parliament to make laws to…
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![Elizabeth Adams: The Judicial Approach to the Judicial Discretion under s.4 HRA in Secretary of State for Business and Trade v Mercer [2024] UKSC 12](https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/elizabeth-adams-e1548439339676.png)
Elizabeth Adams: The Judicial Approach to the Judicial Discretion under s.4 HRA in Secretary of State for Business and Trade v Mercer [2024] UKSC 12
In Secretary of State for Business and Trade v Mercer [2024] UKSC 12 (Mercer), the Supreme Court was confronted with whether and how to exercise its powers under sections 3 and 4 of the HRA 1998. This blog post will focus on assessing how the Supreme Court approached the judicial discretion to grant a declaration…
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Lewis Graham: A Constitutional Clash Averted: Nealon and Hallam v United Kingdom and the Presumption of Innocence
On 11 June 2024, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights handed down its judgment in Nealon and Hallam v United Kingdom. The case is important for two reasons: firstly, because it provides a long-awaited clarification of the law relating to the presumption of innocence under Article 6 of the Convention; secondly,…
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Raffael N. Fasel: Ouster Clauses and the Silent Constitutional Crisis
In a recent comment on the Government’s Rwanda Bill and on speculations about an unprecedented strike down by the Supreme Court, Professor Mark Elliott asked a question that has been on many UK public lawyers’ minds lately: “Are we headed for a constitutional crisis?” This question, to be sure, is not new. However, with a…
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Sanjit Nagi: The Stranglehold of New Labour and Lord Irvine’s Rights-based Constitution
Last year’s Supreme Court decision in R (AAA) v Home Secretary – which found the British government’s Rwanda policy to be unlawful – has reignited broader debates about the position of a government which commands a majority in Parliament vis a vis the judiciary, the separation of powers, the extent to which legislating against judicial…
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Adam Tucker: The Rwanda Policy, Legal Fiction(s), and Parliament’s Legislative Authority
Last week the Supreme Court (in R (AAA) v Home Secretary) found the UK government’s policy to send asylum applicants to Rwanda unlawful on the grounds that “removal … to Rwanda would expose them to a real risk of ill-treatment by reason of refoulement” [149]. In response, the Prime Minister announced that the government intends…
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Jeevan Hariharan: The Changing Face of Horizontal Effect
On 10 March, Lord Sales delivered the Cambridge Freshfields Annual Law Lecture on the topic of ‘constitutional values in the common law of obligations’. The lecture, which has not been discussed so far on this blog, seeks to explain how constitutional values familiar from the world of public law (such as freedom of expression, liberty…
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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…