Professor Mark Elliott
This second post in my ‘Constitutional Law 101’ series – aimed at students studying Constitutional Law and others who are interested in the subject – examines the senses in which the UK constitution is an ‘informal’ one and asks whether the degree of informality associated with the UK system is unwise.
This is the first in a series of posts that I will be publishing this academic year; I am writing them as I return to teaching following some time away due to other duties. The posts will be broadly structured with reference to the topics we consider and the order in which we teach them in the Constitutional Law course at my own university. The series is intended to provide…
A complete list of posts can be found in the archive
In a forthcoming article in Public Law, Nicholas Kilford and I examine three leading UK Supreme Court decisions that have subjected the principle of parliamentary sovereignty to notably unorthodox treatments. In the face of what can only be described as thin judicial reasoning, we ask whether the Court’s omission can be remedied by constructing an…
In an earlier post, I addressed the question whether the Prime Minister must be a member of the House of Commons. Here, I reflect briefly on some interesting points that have been raised in response to my original piece, which raise fundamental questions about the nature of constitutional conventions, including the appropriate extent of reliance…
In his judgment in Ismailov v Foreign Secretary, Saini J appears to endorse two incompatible views of the principle of legality. One of those views reconfigures a principle that has traditionally brought normatively independent common law constitutional principles into relationship with legislation, instead casting it as a tool for determining the “true intention” of Parliament.…
The Chişinău Declaration, issued by the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers on 15 May 2026, is an attempt by signatory States to reframe how the European Convention on Human Rights affects national governments’ capacity to control migration. Meanwhile, concerns about the limits imposed by human rights law in this area are a driving force…
Uncertainty about the position of the Prime Minister has raised the question whether Andy Burnham, currently the Mayor of Greater Manchester, might return to the House of Commons in order to challenge for the leadership of the Labour Party. Some commentators have even suggested that Burnham could, on an interim basis, become Prime Minister before…
As prorogation and a King’s Speech approach, the Terminally Ill Adults Bill cannot now be enacted before the end of the current parliamentary session. By blocking the Bill, has the House of Lords constitutionally overreached?