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7 - The sound of silence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Stephen Sedley
Affiliation:
Judiciary of England and Wales
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Summary

This sketch of a historical theory of public law is an edited version of a paper delivered in June 1993 to the Administrative Law Bar Association in London and published in the Law Quarterly Review. It was written in the immediate aftermath of the Court of Appeal's decision in M v. Home Office, a case to which I return in Chapter 28, ‘The Crown in its own courts’.

The curious history of the events in the borough of Wednesbury in 1947, to which the High Court and Court of Appeal elected to turn a blind eye, can be found in Michael Taggart's essay ‘Reinventing administrative law’ in N. Bamforth and P. Leyland (eds.), Public Law in a Multi-Layered Constitution (Oxford: Hart, 2003). A sabbatarian group which had secured a majority on the council was using cinema licensing legislation, designed for rather different purposes, to stop children (and consequently their parents) going to the pictures on a Sunday – a textbook abuse of power which would not have got past any High Court judge a generation later or, if this essay has its bearings right, a couple of generations earlier. The reasons belong to the still unwritten history of English public law.

Straightforwardly, of course, all constitutional law presupposes the existence of a constitution, whether the constitution is written or not.

Type
Chapter
Information
Ashes and Sparks
Essays On Law and Justice
, pp. 64 - 87
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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References

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