The EU (Withdrawal) Bill is an enormously complex piece of legislation which is likely to bequeath a similarly complex — and uncertain — post-Brexit legal system. Examining the Bill will present Parliament with a unique challenge. In the interests of promoting scrutiny and debate, this post sets out 20 questions that highlight important, and sometimes fundamental, ambiguities and difficulties in relation to the Bill as it is presently drafted.
Category: Constitutional Law
The Scottish Government has issued a statement saying that the EU (Withdrawal) Bill is a “blatant power grab” to which the Scottish Parliament is unlikely to consent. Is the Scottish Government right to characterise the Bill thus? And what will happen if consent to it is not forthcoming?
The Unison case is an important victory for workers who wish to enforce their rights in Employment Tribunals. But the Supreme Court’s judgment also implicates some key principles of UK constitutional law — and raises a question about how far courts can go in upholding such principles.
A collection of key texts, official publications and commentaries relating to the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill
This post looks in some detail (albeit preliminarily) at how the EU (Withdrawal) Bill works, and comments on some of the key constitutional issues that it raises. A shorter post on the Bill, which forms part of my 1,000 words series, can be found here.
The Repeal Bill will remove the European Communities Act 1972 from the statute book while enabling large swathes of European Union law to be kept in force following the UK’s exit from the EU. What light does the Queen’s Speech cast upon this key piece of Brexit legislation?
In this article, first published in Counsel magazine, I consider how constitutional matters influenced the 2017 general election — and what the future constitutional implications of the election generally, and of a hung Parliament in particular, might be.
The Salisbury convention usually limits the House of Lords’ capacity to obstruct legislation implementing Government manifesto commitments. But does it apply if there is a minority or coalition government during a hung Parliament?
Written by Mark Elliott and Robert Thomas, Public Law is the UK’s best-selling textbook in the field. The following post is based on the preface to the third edition, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2017.
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
