The Administrative Court gave judgment earlier today in R (Evans) v Attorney-General [2013] EWHC 1960 (Admin). The case concerns a challenge to the legality of the Attorney-General’s decision to use […]
Earlier today, the Conservative Party published its European Union (Referendum) Bill. The full text of the Bill can be found here on the Party’s website. The likelihood of its being […]
The House of Lords Constitution Committee published its report earlier today on the Jobseekers (Back to Work Schemes) Bill. (Professor Adam Tomkins has drawn attention to this issue on his blog, and has promised a longer post on the subject in due course.) The background to the Bill is formed by the Court of Appeal’s recent decision in R (Reilly […]
I gave a talk earlier today to the Cambridge Sixth Form Law Conference on “Why the British constitution is weird (and interesting)”. The slides that accompanied the talk can be […]
The BBC is reporting that the three main UK political parties have struck a deal on press regulation. What is now clear is that the body responsible for recognising the new regulator will be established by royal charter and will not be underpinned by statute law in the way that Lord Justice Leveson advocated in his report. What is less […]
Sir Philip Sales has an interesting piece in the latest edition of the Law Quarterly Review. In “Rationality, Proportionality and the Development of the Law” (2013) 129 LQR 223, Sales responds to the argument—advanced perhaps most robustly by Paul Craig—that the Wednesbury doctrine of unreasonableness should be supplanted by the proportionality test. As such, Sales supports the view—articulated by the […]
Earlier this week, I published a post about the views recently attributed by the Mail on Sunday to the Home Secretary, Theresa May. (May, according to the Mail, thinks that the UK should pull out of the ECHR – although today’s Independent suggests that there is likely to be a good deal of posturing behind this.) The purpose of this […]
The Government’s human rights attack dogs have been on the offensive this weekend. The Lord Chancellor and Justice Seceretary, Chris Grayling, told the Sunday Telegraph: I cannot conceive of a situation […]
A couple of the latest papers in the LSE Law Department’s Working Papers Series caught my eye. In the first, Peter Ramsay argues (contrary to the ECtHR’s decision in Hirst v UK (No 2)) that the UK’s ban on prisoner voting is necessary and proportionate in a democratic society – and should not therefore be regarded as a breach of the […]
