Constitutional Law (FHS)

From Dicey to the present: competing accounts of ultimate legislative authority in the UK constitution

Constitutional statutes and implied repeal: Thoburn's doctrine and the evolving limits of parliamentary sovereignty

Advanced constitutional law: manner and form theory, the Parliament Acts, and the unresolved debate after R (Jackson) v Attorney General

Bingham's eight principles, their judicial application, and contemporary challenges in the post-Brexit constitutional order

Week 5 — Advanced constitutional law: the separation of powers doctrine, institutional balance, judicial independence, and the contested boundaries of executive, legislative and judicial authority in the UK's uncodified constitution.

The control, justiciability, and limits of executive power in the post-Brexit constitution

Week 7: Devolution and the Sewel Convention

The constitutional transformation wrought by accession, membership, and withdrawal from the European Union.

An analytical treatment of the HRA's interpretive and declaratory mechanisms, with detailed attention to the Ghaidan, Bellinger, and Nicklinson lines of authority

The interplay between Convention rights and the common law's own fundamental rights tradition.

The emerging doctrine of constitutional dialogue between courts and Parliament under the Human Rights Act and beyond

How the Crown lost its powers without losing its place — the formal apex of the constitution and the doctrines that empty it of substantive content.

The non-legal rules that hold the British constitution together — Dicey, Jennings, the Crossman Diaries case, and why conventions cannot be enforced but cannot be ignored.

How elections constitute the constitutional architecture — franchise, FPTP, boundaries, regulation, and the changes since the Elections Act 2022.

Article 10 ECHR, common-law constitutional rights, public-order law, and the modern UK speech-and-protest doctrine.

Codification, devolution, House of Lords, the HRA, electoral reform, and Scotland — the principal reform debates and the political conditions for change.