A Book Bearing On the UK Judicial System: Isobel Williams's The Supreme Court: A Guide For Bears @otium_Catulle @UKSupremeCourt

Now available from the UK Supreme Court shop and from the artist, Isobel Williams,

The Supreme Court, A Guide For Bears. Paperback, 32pp, 8" x 10", illustrated in colour, ISBN 978-1-9997146-2-8












This book promises to be Beary Good, as well as a Pandamonium devoted to the judicial branch.

More about the book from Legal Cheek.

Mohr @ucddublin on The Irish Question and the Evolution of British Imperial Law, 1916-1922

Thomas Mohr, Sutherland School of Law, University College Dublin, has published The Irish Question and the Evolution of British Imperial Law, 1916-1922 as UCD Working Papers in Law, Criminology & Socio-Legal Studies Research Paper No. 12. Here is the abstract.

By the early twentieth century Dominion status seemed ideally suited as the answer to the perennial ‘Irish question’. It offered Ireland a generous measure of autonomy while maintaining the territorial integrity of the British Empire. Nevertheless, the prospect of granting Dominion status to Ireland remained little more than a fantasy on the eve of the outbreak of the First World War. This reality was altered by two parallel historical developments. The first of these was the 1916 Easter rising that killed any possibility of an effective home rule settlement for the entire island of Ireland. The second was a rapid acceleration in the evolution of the self-governing Dominions of the Empire towards greater autonomy in the constitutional sphere. In the aftermath of the First World War these two developments came together in the signing of the 1921 Treaty that permitted the Irish Free State to emerge with the status of a self-governing Dominion, the same constitutional status held by Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. This article will examine the legal and constitutional developments that took place between 1914 and 1922 that removed the possibility of an ‘Irish Dominion’ from the realms of fantasy and allowed it to play a vital role in the emergence of the self-governing Irish state. It also examines the important role of Hessel Duncan Hall’s book The British Commonwealth of Nations (1920) in influencing this process.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Neil Walker On UK Constitutional Practice and the Future of Scotland

Neil Walker, University of Edinburgh School of Law, is publishing The Territorial Constitution and the Future of Scotland in The Scottish Independence Referendum: Constitutional and Political Implciations (A. McHarg, T. Mullen, A. Page, and N. Walker, eds.; OUP, 2016). Here is the abstract.

This paper considers the ways in which constitutional thought and practice continue to shape the distinctiveness of Scotland as a political community in the post-independence referendum period. The emphasis is not just on the immediate future, nor on some ideal ‘deep future’, but on the foreseeable future. What are the candidate models and plausible pathways by which the future development of the territorial constitution might be pursued? What benefits and drawbacks are associated with different approaches and what are their prospects of success? In particular, what are the limits of accommodation of Scottish self-government within the framework of the UK state, and how, if at all, might such an accommodation be maintained in the face of continuing strong support for independence? The headline notion of the 'territorial constitution' provides a useful angle of approach to these questions. The territorial constitution could signify one of three things. It might refer to the overall constitutional order as conventionally understood. Here we use the ‘territorial’ part as mere shorthand to refer to the (geographically located) state as a constitutional whole. Yet, however familiar, this usage is of limited utility in unpacking Scottish constitutional distinctiveness. In its tendency to reduce constitutional authority to the sovereign state alone, this 'Westphalian' version of the territorial constitution obstructs an adequate appreciation of Scotland's situation and prospects in a more complex regulatory environment. Instead, the article introduces two applications of the idea of a territorial constitution that are less familiar but more promising for our purposes. One usage, which has recently gained ground in mainstream constitutional debate, treats the ‘territorial’ adjective as referring to just one discrete dimension and focus of treatment within a broader constitutional order, albeit an order that may still be understood in terms of the paramount authority of the sovereign state. That dimension involves the vertical distribution of authority within the polity. This is the usage with which we are mainly concerned in the present paper. The other possible application to which we refer departs more radically from our conventional constitutional frame of reference. More than a matter of adjectival stress, instead it treats ‘territorial constitution' as a compound noun -- a distinct and separate species within the constitutional genus, and so as only one of a variety of 'constitutional' orders (including functionally defined orders such as the EU, or the 'security constitution' of the UN) applicable to any particular population. From these broader perspectives, many of the positions on the Scottish constitutional future under review in these turbulent post-referendum times, from the traditional unitary state with limited devolution of powers, through the new brand of asymmetrical Unionism and a broader framework of multilateral federalism to the option of sovereign independence, look like positions along a spectrum rather than categorically distinct choices.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.