These notes cover the UK constitution as taught on postgraduate law conversion courses (the GDL and the PGDL). They can also cover topics on introductory public, administrative, and constitutional law papers taught on UK undergraduate Law degrees (LLBs).
Using these notes, I gained a Distinction...
Public Law - The UK Constitution: Constitutional Fundamentals and Sources of
the Constitution
What is Public Law?
Public Law: law concerned with interactions between individuals and the state.
- Constitutional Law:
- Study of ‘political’ institutions, what they are, their powers, and the
principles on which they are founded and operated
- Administrative Law:
- Legal process governing disputes individuals have over decisions made
by those exercising their executive functions
- E.g. judicial review: when a citizen asks a judge to challenge and
examine the lawfulness of a decision that has been made by the
government.
- Check on Executive - the means of complaint for individuals
who believe that government officials (that is, those making
decisions that fall within the executive function of
government) have made decisions or acted in a way that’s
unlawful or in breach of legal rules
- Civil Liberties:
- Study of human rights, and how individuals’ liberties are governed and
infringed upon by the state
Constitution:
- In the wider sense, political constitutions:
1) set out what the institutions for state (or gov’t) are
2) how these institutions operate and interact
3) guarantee certain rights to its citizens
- In the narrow sense - a single written document
UK Constitution:
, - It is ‘unwritten’ in the sense that there is no single authoritative constitutional
document in which the rules which establish and regulate the government are
laid out
- There are four sources of the UK constitution - legislation, case/common law,
RP, constitutional conventions.
Core principles of the UK Constitution:
- The rule of law
- Separation of powers
- Supremacy of Parliament
- A common law doctrine - the courts must prioritise legislation created by
Parliament over common law
- Parliament has the right to introduce or repeal law as it sees fit, and
this right - resulting legislation - cannot be overridden (e.g. by the
courts)
- AV Dicey, ‘An Introduction to the Study of the Law of the
Constitution, 1885
Different forms of constitution:
- Republican
- Presidential
- Head of state (e.g. President/figurehead)
- E.g. USA, Germany
- Monarchical
- Parliamentary
- Head of state chosen from legislature, and hereditary monarch
- The PM is an MP (elected into Parliament)
- Either constitutional monarchy (UK, Sweden) or powerful (Saudi
Arabia)
Sources of the UK Constitution:
Statute
- Acts of Parliament of constitutional importance - no fixed criteria for this (no
concept of Higher Law due to unwritten/uncodified nature of the UK constitution)
- Primary legislation: laws made and passed by Parliament
- Secondary legislation: laws made by other bodies/Ministers (not Parliament)
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