Public Law is an advanced text that comprehensively covers the key topics in the field of public law. The book presents an analysis of the law and institutions of public law, and places the legal issues within the wider socio-political context within which the constitution operates. Three key themes that permeate the content allow readers to approach the subject in a structured way. The key themes are the significance of executive power in the contemporary constitution and the challenge of ensuring that those who wield it are held to account, the shift in recent times from a political to a more legal constitution and the implications of this change, and the increasingly ‘multilayered’ character of the British constitution.
Book
Lisa Webley and Harriet Samuels
Titles in the Complete series combine extracts from a wide range of primary materials with clear explanatory text to provide readers with a complete introductory resource. Complete Public Law combines clear explanatory text and practical learning features with extracts from a wide range of primary and secondary materials. The book has been structured with the needs of undergraduate courses in mind. Opening with consideration of basic constitutional principles (in which no previous knowledge is assumed), the chapters move on to cover all other essential areas, before closing with consideration of the principles and procedures of judicial review. This edition includes substantial updates to address the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union and the constitutional implications these new arrangements have, including in the context of devolution.
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Ian Loveland
Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, and Human Rights provides an in-depth cross disciplinary introduction to the subject of public law, covering the core elements of a constitutional and administrative law syllabus. In addition, it explores the latest ongoing debates around potential constitutional reforms. The book draws heavily on historical sources and on ideas from political science and political theory as well as legal and social history. It also includes detailed coverage of the UK’s proposed departure from the European Union after the 2016 referendum and the subsequent Miller litigations, as well as the negotiations on the terms of departure. It looks at the polarised positions of ‘soft brexit’ and ‘hard brexit’ and examines what brexit might actually mean for the United Kingdom.
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David Yuratich
Public Law: Principles to Practice begins by looking at the difference between public and private law. Public law is about the relationship between citizens and the state and the various institutions within the state, and includes any aspect of how the state interacts with its citizens. However, the term ‘public law’ is most commonly used to refer to two interconnected areas of law: administrative law and constitutional law. After a general introduction to the subject, the second part of the book focuses on UK constitutional law. Chapters detail topics such as the separation of powers, accountability and Parliament, the rule of law, prerogative powers, devolution, and local government. The next part of the book moves on to consider administrative law. Here, the book examines judicial review, looking at irrationality and proportionality, legitimate expectations, and administrative justice. The last chapter looks at tribunals, ombudsmen, and public inquiries and the book ends with a glossary of terms.
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Mark Elliott and Robert Thomas
Public Law is an advanced text that comprehensively covers the key topics in the field of public law. The book presents an analysis of the law and institutions of public law, and places the legal issues within the wider socio-political context within which the constitution operates. Three key themes that permeate the content allow readers to approach the subject in a structured way. The key themes are the significance of executive power in the contemporary constitution and the challenge of ensuring that those who wield it are held to account, the shift in recent times from a political to a more legal constitution and the implications of this change, and the increasingly ‘multilayered’ character of the British constitution.
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2. Constitutions and Constitutional Law
This chapter examines the specific functions and characteristics of constitutions in general terms—thinking of what the constitutions of Western democratic countries are typically like—rather than with particular reference to the UK, and then considers how the UK’s constitutional arrangements measure up. This is followed by three case studies that illustrate how the different topics considered in this book relate to one another, and which also provide an overview of the type—and importance—of the issues with which public law is concerned.
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4. Brexit and the UK Constitution
Paul Craig
This chapter is, for obvious reasons, not a modification of the chapter from the previous edition. It is a completely new chapter, which considers the effect of Brexit on the UK constitution. There is discussion of the constitutional implications of triggering exit from the EU, and whether this could be done by the executive via the prerogative, or whether this was conditional on prior legislative approval through a statute. The discussion thereafter considers the constitutional implications of Brexit in terms of supremacy, rights, executive accountability to the legislature and devolution. The chapter concludes with discussion as to the paradox of sovereignty in the context of Brexit.
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6. The House of Lords
This chapter examines whether the House of Lords plays an effective anti-majoritarian legislative role. The chapter begins by discussing the changing nature of the relationship between the Commons and the Lords in the post-revolutionary era, focusing in particular on the emergence in the early nineteenth century of a political presumption that the Lords was becoming the inferior partner within Parliament and on the passage of the Parliament Act 1911 in which legal force was given to that political presumption. The chapter also addresses the various proposals put forward in the modern era to reform both the composition and the powers of the House of Lords, and suggests that most reform plans present a paradox. The more we ask a second chamber to perform functions complementary to those of the Commons, the more we demand of its members that they be (as individuals and as a body) ‘expert’, ‘experienced’, and ‘nonpartisan’, and so the more we reveal the crushing dominance of party politics in the lower house, and the incapacity and/or unwillingness of backbench MPs to exert a restraining influence on government activities. This suggests that the key division within the legislative process is now not Lords versus Commons, nor Labour versus Conservative, but party versus national interest. The final part of the chapter explores a more obviously ‘legal’ question; namely the implications of the Parliament Act 1911 for traditional understandings of the doctrine of Parliamentary sovereignty.
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Neil Parpworth
The purpose of this book is to introduce the reader to the fundamental principles and concepts of constitutional and administrative law. It is highly popular with undergraduates for its clear writing style and the ease with which it guides the reader through key principles of public law. This twelfth edition incorporates the significant developments in this ever-changing area of the law. The book also includes a range of useful features to help students get to grips with the subject matter. These include further reading suggestions to support deeper research, a large number of self-test questions to help reinforce knowledge, and chapter summaries and numbered paragraphs to aid navigation and revision. This new edition has been fully updated to cover all the latest reforms in constitutional and administrative law, including those relating to devolution and Brexit.
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2. Constitutions and Constitutional Law
This chapter examines the specific functions and characteristics of constitutions in general terms—thinking of what the constitutions of western democratic countries are typically like—rather than with particular reference to the UK, and then considers how the UK’s constitutional arrangements measure up. The fact that important principles in the UK are not written into laws that have special, higher constitutional status does not mean that there are no such principles. The chapter then outlines lessons learnt from two periods in recent constitutional history: the ‘New Labour’ governments and the Brexit era; both of which, in constitutional terms, were characterised by far-reaching reforms. These topics provide an overview of the type—and importance—of the issues with which public law is concerned.
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12. The Relationship between Parliament, the Executive and the Judiciary
Alison L. Young
When examining the recent evolution of the Constitution, it is argued that the UK has become more ‘legal’ as opposed to ‘political’. The last twenty years has seen a growth in legislation and case law, particularly that of the Supreme Court, regulating aspects of the UK constitution. This chapter investigates this claim. It argues that, whilst we can point to a growth in both legislation and case law, when we look at the case law more closely we can see that the courts balance an array of factors when determining how far to control executive actions. These factors include an analysis of the relative institutional features and constitutional role of the legislature, the executive and the courts. This evidence, in turn, questions the traditional understanding of the separation of powers as a hidden component of the UK constitution. It is not the case that courts merely balance the rule of law and parliamentary sovereignty in order to determine how far to control executive actions. Rather, the courts determine how to make this balance through the lens of the separation of powers, evaluating institutional and constitutional features. In doing so, they are upholding necessary checks and balances in the UK constitution.
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9. Devolution in Northern Ireland
Brice Dickson
Northern Ireland has had a devolved legislature and government, off and on, since 1921. This chapter first examines the nature of the devolution arrangements in place between 1921 and 1972 and then explains what was done to keep Northern Ireland running during the periods of direct rule from Westminster and Whitehall between 1972 and 1999 and between 2002 and 2007. The third section looks at how devolution operated under the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement from 1999 to 2002 and from 2007 to 2017. The chapter then considers the reasons for the failure since 2017 to get devolution re-established and concludes by canvassing what the future constitutional arrangements for Northern Ireland might be. Taken in the round, Northern Ireland’s experience of devolution during the past 98 years has been very troubled. Brexit, alas, seems unlikely to make it less so in the years ahead.
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12. Responsible Government and Constitutional Conventions
Titles in the Complete series combine extracts from a wide range of primary materials with clear explanatory text to provide readers with a complete introductory resource. This chapter discusses the nature and extent of constitutional conventions, which are political rules that are binding upon those to whom they apply. They apply to the relationships between the Crown, Parliament, the judiciary, the civil service, and the executive, and play a key role in limiting the powers granted to institutions of government by unwritten rules or sources. Constitutional conventions also regulate key parts of the relationship between the institutions of government. The doctrine of ministerial responsibility is one of the most important examples of constitutional conventions regulating the behaviour of the executive. There are two main branches of ministerial responsibility. One is individual ministerial responsibility—that is, a minister’s obligation to account to Parliament for his or her words and actions and for those of his or her civil servants. The second branch of ministerial responsibility is collective ministerial responsibility. Amongst other things, collective ministerial responsibility prescribes that decisions reached by the Cabinet or other ministerial committees are binding on all members of the government, regardless of whether or not the individual ministers agree with them.
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8. Parliamentary Privilege
This chapter, which examines the so-called parliamentary privileges of the House of Commons and the House of Lords, begins by discussing Article 9 of the Bill of Rights 1689. It then explores over three hundred years of the history of parliamentary privilege in five general areas: (i) the houses’ power to regulate their own composition through the admission, retention, and expulsion of their members; (ii) the publication of details of house business; (iii) the admissibility before the courts of such published material; (iv) the concept of ‘contempt of the house’; and (v) the regulation of MPs’ ethical standards. The chapter also analyses several seminal cases in which the courts have adjudicated on both the nature and extent of parliamentary privilege and considers how case law in relation to this area of the constitution balances the sometimes competing concepts of the sovereignty of Parliament, the rule of law, and the separation of powers.
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21. Human Rights V: Governmental Powers of Arrest and Detention
This chapter examines government powers of arrest and detention. Section I provides a three-part analysis of police powers to restrict an individual’s physical liberty under what we might regard as ‘ordinary’ laws. The first part of the chapter considers powers of ‘arrest’; the second section addresses powers of detention that arise consequent upon arrest but before the detained person has been charged with any offence; and the third considers situations in which a person can lawfully be detained without actually being arrested. Section II shifts the focus of the chapter to what we might consider to be ‘extraordinary’ laws, by describing and analysing the extent to which the constitution permits deprivation of liberty for ‘terrorist’ offences, specifically powers of arrest and detention which existed between 1945 to 1977, and then in the post-1977 era.
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4. The Royal Prerogative
This chapter considers the evolving constitutional status of the royal prerogative in the courts during the twentieth century. The discussions cover the relationship between statute, the prerogative, and the rule of law; the traditional perspective on judicial review of prerogative powers and the rejection of that traditional perspective in the House of Lords’ judgment in Council of Civil Service Unions v Minister for the Civil Service (GCHQ). The chapter continues by analysing the ways in which the new organising principle of ‘justiciability’ which emerged in the GCHQ judgment in the 1980s has since been applied in several leading cases, and suggests that in recent years the courts have adopted an increasingly rigorous approach to the supervision of governmental actions claimed to be taken under prerogative powers.
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5. The House of Commons
This chapter examines the relationship between the government and the House of Commons, in order further to develop arguments concerning the doctrines of parliamentary sovereignty and the separation of powers within the contemporary constitution. Consideration is given both to the role played by the House of Commons within the legislative process and its effectiveness as a means to provide scrutiny of and challenges to the ways in which the government exercises its statutory and prerogative powers. The chapter argues that, for most of the modern era, the House of Commons has been a body in which party politics is the dominant determinant both in the legislative process and in respect of executive accountability and asks if we should accept that the Commons is manifestly now a factional rather than national assembly for most purposes. But it is also suggested that it would be premature to conclude that the constitution permits factional concerns to determine both the content of legislation and the parliamentary accountability of government behaviour.
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3. The Nature of the British Constitution
Titles in the Complete series combine extracts from a wide range of primary materials with clear explanatory text to provide readers with a complete introductory resource. This chapter outlines the characteristics of the UK constitution, which is not a traditional written constitution and, thus, is defined as an ‘unwritten’ constitution. It is not hierarchically superior to all other law in the country, which means that Acts of Parliament cannot be compared with it by judges and be declared as unconstitutional and invalid. Neither can the UK constitution be enforced against the legislature as a result, nor is it entrenched and protected, because it can always be changed by Act of Parliament. However, it can be legally enforced by the mechanism of judicial review against the executive, meaning that the executive may legally act only within its legal power. The chapter also considers the sources that make up the UK constitution and proposed constitutional reforms.
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4. The Rule of Law
Titles in the Complete series combine extracts from a wide range of primary materials with clear explanatory text to provide readers with a complete introductory resource. This chapter explains the meaning and significance of the rule of law, briefly tracing the history of the rule of law and considering the main similarities and differences between various theories of the rule of law. It then assesses the impact of recent legal reforms on the operations of the rule of law in the UK. These reforms include the extension of detention without trial; the developing body of anti-terror legislation; and the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, which reinforces the importance of the independence of the judiciary and puts measures in place to attempt to strengthen the separation of the courts from the other arms of the state. Finally, the chapter discusses judicial interpretation of the rule of law through a selection of cases that have examined the legality, irrationality, or procedural impropriety of the actions of the executive or public bodies and whether their actions conform to the Human Rights Act 1998.
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1. Defining the Constitution?
This chapter identifies evaluative criteria that readers may wish to keep in mind when considering the description and analysis of the United Kingdom’s current constitutional arrangements presented in the rest of the book. The chapter begins by exploring what we might regard from a contemporary perspective as the essential features of the governmental systems adopted in a ‘democratic’ state. In order to illustrate the very contested nature of this concept of ‘democracy’, the chapter presents and analyses several hypothetical examples of what we might (or might not) regard as acceptable forms of governance, and explores the the notion of a country’s constitution being properly described as as a social and political contract formulated by its citizens. The chapter concludes by examining briefly the solutions adopted by the American revolutionaries to resolve the constitutional difficulties they faced when the United States became an independent country.
