Professor Mark Elliott
In an earlier post and in evidence to the House of Lords Constitution Committee I have already drawn attention to concerns about the attempt in the United Kingdom Internal Market […]
The willingness of the UK’s Brexiteer-led Government to pick fights with the European Union is a given. So too, now, is its appetite for a show-down with the courts, as […]
In a new paper, I examine the way in which judges in the UK respond to ouster clauses — and reflect on what such responses might tell us about the nature of the contemporary British constitution and the courts’ perception of their place within it
In the Privacy International case, the Court of Appeal accepted that an ouster clause precluded judicial review of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. Sales LJ contended that the issue turned on ‘a short point of statutory construction’. The reality, however, is that such cases take the courts into the deepest of constitutional waters.
Ouster clauses raise difficult questions about the relationship between the constitutional principles of the rule of law and the sovereignty of Parliament — as the disagreement between the two judges in this case demonstrates
