This 1,000 words post explains how the EU (Withdrawal) Bill works and addresses some of the main constitutional concerns it raises. A longer and more technical analysis of the Bill can be found here.
Category: Other
On 1 February, the House of Lords Constitution Committee took evidence from Professors John Bell, Paul Craig and Alison Young on the likely constitutional implications of the ‘Great Repeal Bill’. The ‘Great Repeal Bill’ is not to be confused with the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill, which is currently before Parliament. The latter Bill was introduced
In this 1,000 words post I analyse and reflect upon the Supreme Court’s judgment in R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union [2017] UKSC 5. Since writing this post, I have completed work on a longer article on Miller for the Cambridge Law Journal. A pre-publication version of the article can be downloaded here.
Thanks to a court order, the Government’s case — its “detailed grounds of resistance” — in the Article 50 litigation currently pending before the High Court has been published. I have written before on this matter, arguing that the better view is that legislation is not needed for the purpose of triggering Article 50, but
In a leading article published on 3 February 2016, The Times offered its support to the notion of establishing a constitutional court for the UK—an idea floated, if only obliquely, by the Justice Secretary Michael Gove. The attraction of a constitutional court, said The Times, is that it would enable the UK to stand up for national values
Supreme Court judgments addressing—but not resolving—the future direction of substantive judicial review have been coming thick and fast in the last year or two. Notable examples include Kennedy v The Charity Commission [2014] UKSC 20 (on which I posted here), Pham v Secretary of State for the Home Department [2015] UKSC 19 (blog post) and
I have written in previous posts about the Scotland Bill and, in particular, the possible constitutional implications—including for the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty—of clauses 1 and 2 of the Bill, which respectively concern the ‘permanence’ of the Scottish Parliament and Government and the Sewel Convention. As noted in a previous post, the House of Lords
The Strathclyde Review, which was prompted by the House of Lords’ opposition to secondary legislation on tax credits, has been published. Its recommendation is straightforward: that the House of Lords’ powers in respect of statutory instruments (which is the form taken by the majority of secondary legislation) should be brought broadly into line with its powers, under
Under Chris Grayling’s stewardship of the Ministry of Justice, the view took hold—ample evidence to the contrary notwithstanding—that too many claims for judicial review were being initiated, and that judicial review was being used abusively for ‘political’ purposes. One of the ill-conceived ideas that grew out of this unfounded notion was that courts should be required
As part of Policy Exchange’s Judicial Power Project, Richard Ekins and Christopher Forsyth have published a trenchant critique of the Supreme Court’s judgment in Evans, concerning the lawfulness of the Government’s decision to veto disclosure of Prince Charles’s correspondence with Ministers under the Freedom of Information Act 2000. I published my own analysis of Evans
