Earlier this week, I gave a Cambridge Centre for Public Law Seminar on the subject of the UK Supreme Court’s judgment in R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union [2017] UKSC 5, in which it was held that the process of withdrawing from the EU under Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union could not be initiated by the UK Government using prerogative power, but instead could occur only following the enactment of primary legislation. In the talk, I critically examined the reasoning of the majority in Miller on the prerogative v legislation question, as well as commenting on the position adopted by the Court on the question of whether constitution convention required devolved assent to any legislation paving the way for the triggering of Article 50.

The audio of my talk can be accessed via the SoundCloud player above or via this link. The slides that accompanied the talk are available here. The talk draws upon a paper entitled “The Supreme Court’s Judgment in Miller: In Search of Constitutional Principle” that will be published in the Cambridge Law Journal in July 2017. A draft of the paper can be found here.

I am grateful to Professor David Feldman for organising the seminar and to Daniel Bates for his assistance with the audio recording.