The Fundamentality of Rights at Common Law
I recently completed a paper, to be published in a forthcoming edited collection, on ‘The Fundamentality of Rights at Common Law’. The concern of the paper is with the senses […]
Unison in the Supreme Court: Tribunal Fees, Constitutional Rights and the Rule of Law
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.
Michael Gove, the Justice Committee and the Human Rights Act
The new Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor, Michael Gove, gave evidence for the first time today to the House of Commons Justice Committee. We learned a little, but not a […]
What does a Conservative government mean for the future of human rights in the UK?
It seems that the Conservative Party is on its way to forming an expectation-defying single-party government — which makes its plans for human-rights reform suddenly more relevant than they seemed […]
Beyond the European Convention: Human Rights and the Common Law
I gave a Current Legal Problems lecture in March concerning the relationship between common-law constitutional rights and the system of rights protection that obtains under the Human Rights Act 1998 […]
A Post-European British constitution: Plus ça change?
I am giving a Current Legal Problems lecture at the UCL Faculty of Laws later this week. The lecture is entitled: “A post-European British constitution: Plus ça change?” The following is the opening section […]
Lady Hale’s 2015 Bryce Lecture: The Supreme Court in the United Kingdom Constitution
Lady Hale gave the 2015 Bryce Lecture earlier this month, taking “The Supreme Court in the United Kingdom Constitution” as her title. The lecture does not break any new ground, but is a helpful overview of a range of issues concerning the constitutional authority of the courts vis-a-vis the other branches of government, with particular reference to contemporary issues relating to […]
#50cases — Three suggestions
Adam Wagner, editor of the excellent UK Human Rights Blog, is in the process of launching a new Human Rights Information Project, as part of which he is crowdsourcing “50 […]
Moohan: Prisoner voting, the independence referendum and the common law
I have been thinking a good deal recently — partly because I will soon be giving a Current Legal Problems lecture on the topic — about the relationship between common-law constitutional rights and rights enshrined in the ECHR and given domestic effect by the Human Rights Act 1998. A stream of recent Supreme Court decisions — including Osborn v Parole […]
Lord Reed on EU law and the UK constitution
A brief post to draw attention to Lord Reed’s recent Sir Thomas More Lecture entitled “EU Law and the Supreme Court”. Lord Reed devotes part of the lecture to a […]
My analysis of the Conservative Party’s proposals for a British Bill of Rights
I wrote earlier this week about David Cameron’s announcement at the Conservative Party conference that a future Tory government would repeal the Human Rights Act 1998 and replace it with […]
Common-law constitutionalism and proportionality in the Supreme Court: Kennedy v The Charity Commission
The Supreme Court’s judgment last week in Kennedy v The Charity Commission [2014] UKSC 20 is the latest in a series of decisions—including, most notably, R (HS2 Action Alliance Ltd) v Secretary of State for Transport [2014] UKSC 3 (see this post) and Osborn v Parole Board [2013] UKSC 61 (see this post)—in which the Court has placed very specific emphasis on the […]
Osborn: The common law, the Convention, and the right to an oral hearing
I wrote recently about the what might happen if—as is an increasingly less-fanciful prospect—human rights law in the UK were to be fundamentally altered through repeal of the Human Rights Act 1998 […]
The government’s power to terminate judicial review cases, the rule of law, and the limits of political constitutionalism
A Tunisian man, whose British wife and son live in the UK, is excluded from the country on national security grounds. He challenges that exclusion decision by way of judicial review, but the government “terminates” the proceedings. If that sounds like a Kafkaesque nightmare, then think again. Precisely that factual matrix was at stake in R (Ignaoua) v Secretary of […]
Open justice in the Supreme Court: principle or pragmatism?
The Supreme Court gave judgment last week in the Bank Mellat cases: Bank Mellat v HM Treasury (No 1) [2013] UKSC 38 and Bank Mellat v HM Treasury (No 2) […]
