The United Kingdom’s Human Rights Act as a Catalyst of Constitutional Migration: Patterns and Limitations of Rights Importation by Design

The United Kingdom Human Rights Act 1998 – constitutional migration – impacts of legislative design and process on the internalisation of international standards – a taxonomy of migratory patterns under the Human Rights Act – constitutional migration as a source of constitutional instability – proposals for a British Bill of Rights

The new constitutional role of the judiciary

Over the last few decades, the UK has experienced a profound – if quiet – constitutional transformation. The judicial reception of EU law, for instance, has been described as ‘one of the most fundamental realignments of the constitutional order since the end of the seventeenth century’. But these developments have hardly been appreciated within broader public debates, which remain rooted in/anchored to notions of parliamentary sovereignty

Unity, Disunity and Vacuity: Constitutional Adjudication and the Common Law

Roger Masterman Se-Shauna Wheatle Our thanks are due to Mark Elliott and William Lucy for their comments on a previous draft. The common law is often seen as a unifying and stabilising factor across and within jurisdictions; in the United Kingdom, for instance, the common law is appealed to as a familiar and certain alternative to the unpredictable and overweening impacts of European human rights law. This is in spite of the common law’s propensity for reinvention, and the internal divisions and tensions within both the substance and methodologies of the common law. These ructions are particularly evident in the constitutional common law and its approach to the resolution of fundamental constitutional conflict. Though primarily regarded as the vehicle for the realisation of the private law of obligations, the last 20 years have seen the English common law assume a distinctly constitutional character. The articulation of fundamental rights, though lacking..

A Common Law Resurgence in Rights Protection?

Following a period of relative dormancy, the UK Supreme Court has revitalised the notion that the common law might provide effective protection for human rights. In Osborn v Parole Board , Kennedy v Information Commissioner and A v BBC the Supreme Court has provided support for the suggestion that the common law—and not the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights—should be the primary source of legal authority for a domestic court considering an issue of individual rights. This piece traces this resurgence of common law rights reasoning, and assesses the nature of the primacy it seeks to accord to the common law

Brexit and the United Kingdom’s Devolutionary Constitution

This piece considers the implications of the Brexit process for the United Kingdom’s territorial constitution. It advances two narratives of the devolutionary settlement; one which emphasises the continuing post-devolution influence – and dominance – of the institutions of UK-level government, the other which regards devolution as having engineered a quasi-federal division of powers and having diluted the sovereignty of the Westminster Parliament via expressions of national sovereignty in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The continuing resonance of the former is addressed across three elements of the Brexit process: (i) the design and outcome of the 2016 referendum; (ii) litigation concerning Brexit and devolution; and (iii) the legislative process of repatriating competences to domestic institutions from the EU. Seen through these lenses, Brexit is argued to provide ongoing evidence of the democratic deficits that the post-1998 phase of devolution was designed to address, and of an increasingly unstable territorial constitution