The English Historical Constitution
Continuity, Change and European Effects

Allison employs an historical constitutional approach to assess doctrines and institutions in English constitutional law.

J. W. F. Allison (Author)

9780521702362, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 11 October 2007

288 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.8 cm, 0.472 kg

'The English Historical Constitution is an important work which deserves careful study by constitutional lawyers. … [It is] a book that is worth reading many times.' Public Law

The fundamental legal and institutional changes of recent decades have brought the English constitution into question. Accompanying issues have been the extent to which its traditional character and main features have been changed, lost their former appeal and retained their distinctness in the European Union. These issues are not readily addressed in everyday thinking about a constitution simply conceived as unwritten or in constitutional accounts variously preoccupied with abstract analysis, political accountability or transcendent norms. The English Historical Constitution addresses these issues by developing a historical constitutional approach and thus elaborating on continuity and change in the constitution's main doctrines and institutions. From an English legal perspective, it offers a complement or corrective to analytical, political and normative approaches by reforming an old conception of the historical constitution and of its history, partly obscured and long neglected through the modern analytical preoccupation with its law as an abstract scheme of rules, principles and practices.

1. Introduction
2. A historical constitutional approach
3. The crown: evolution through institutional change and conservation
4. The separation of powers as a customary practice
5. Parliamentary sovereignty and the European Community: the economy of the common law
6. The brief rule of a controlling common law
7. Dicey's progressive and reactionary rule of law
8. Beyond Dicey
9. Conclusion and implications.

Subject Areas: Constitutional & administrative law [LND], British & Irish history [HBJD1]