Albert Venn Dicey Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Albert Venn Dicey (1835–1922) was an English constitutional lawyer and ideologue of unionism. Dicey was born in the English midlands and educated at Oxford, where he became a senior law professor in 1882 and remained for the rest of his life. He is known in political science especially for his Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (1885). It went through eight editions in his lifetime, the last with a long introduction relating his constitutional theory to his ideology. Later editions, without the controversial introduction, served as a constitutional law text for law students in the United Kingdom until very recently. In the most important U.K. constitutional law case of recent times, the judges called him “our greatest constitutional lawyer.”

Dicey’s two normative principles were expressed as the “rule of law” and “parliamentary sovereignty. ”The rule of law meant that everybody without exception was subject to the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts and could not be punished except after due process in those courts; furthermore, liberty of speech and assembly was protected by the common law rather than by constitutional entrenchment. Parliamentary sovereignty meant that “Parliament . . . has, under the English constitution, the right to make or unmake any law whatever.” From this it followed that the only thing a parliament could not do was bind its successor, because that would “fetter” the future Parliament’s ability to exercise its sovereignty.

It is not easy to reconcile Dicey’s two principles. The U.K. Parliament could pass a retrospective law. Unlike the U.S. Congress, it is not constitutionally barred from doing so. In that case, Dicey’s two principles are incompatible. Also, when the principle of parliamentary sovereignty came to contradict Dicey’s ideology, he kept the ideology and jettisoned the principle. Such is English constitutional lawyers’ reverence for Dicey that they do not generally accept that his arguments are mutually contradictory.

Dicey was a fervent defender of the union of the United Kingdom. The state was created by the Acts of Union of 1707 and 1800. The first of these added Scotland and the second Ireland to the kingdom. By Dicey’s time, the Scottish union was legitimate in Scotland, but the Irish union was illegitimate in most of Ireland. The Irish Party, which had pledged to weaken the Irish union, held a bloc of over 80 seats in the House of Commons and was pivotal in four of the seven parliaments between 1885 and 1918. For Dicey and other ideologues, to weaken the union was to weaken the British empire; therefore, Ireland must be retained at all costs. This violated the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, as Parliament could perfectly properly repeal the 1800 union. Dicey devoted all his energies to blocking that and encouraged the paramilitary revolt in the Protestant parts of Northern Ireland that blocked the enactment of Irish Home Rule between 1912 and 1914. A resolution of Northern Ireland’s constitutional status was not reached until the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement of 1998.

Bibliography:

Dicey, Albert V. A Fool’s Paradise: Being a Constitutionalist’s Criticism on [sic] the Home Rule Bill of 1912. London: John Murray, 1913.
Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, 8th ed. London: Macmillan, 1915.
McLean, Iain. What’s Wrong with the British Constitution? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.