Ivor Jennings Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Sir Ivor Jennings (1902–1965) was an English constitutional lawyer. He adapted jurist and constitutional theorist Albert Venn Dicey’s doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty for an era of executive sovereignty over parliament. Although an acute observer of Dicey’s weaknesses, Jennings provided few constructive arguments of his own. Due to this he was overshadowed when constitutional writers reverted to their former hostility to executive domination over the legislature and by the sudden rise of judicial review in the United Kingdom.

Born into a working-class family in Bristol, Jennings was marked as an academic lawyer from an early age. He attended Cambridge University, then went to work as an academic lawyer for his entire career, apart from a spell in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), where he was a university principal. He was much sought after as a constitution writer for newly independent states in the British Commonwealth in the 1950s.

In his 1933 Law and the Constitution, which ran into five editions, Jennings merged the constitutional doctrines of Dicey and British economist and journalist Walter Bagehot. From Bagehot he accepted the view that the UK executive and legislature were fused, so that “acts of Parliament” meant “acts by the governing party. ”The basic feature of the British constitution was, for Jennings, not parliamentary sovereignty, which he dismissed as a “legal fiction,” but the fact that the executive derived its authority from popular election and would therefore not deliberately pass any act that made it likely to lose the next general election.

Nevertheless, parliamentary sovereignty did play a role in Jennings’ constitutionalism, as it held the courts in check. Like earlier English constitutional writers, Jennings was hostile to judicial review of legislative or executive actions. The government was elected; judges were not. It was for the government, not the judges, to face the people with the consequences of their decisions. He repeated this analysis in his 1936 Cabinet Government, which remained influential until the 1970s.

As with Dicey and Bagehot, Jennings’ constitutional arguments have been sidelined by the rapid growth of judicial review in the UK since the 1980s and by the first straightforward setting aside of a statute of the UK Parliament. This occurred in 1991, when first the European Court of Justice and then the UK domestic courts ruled that an act discriminating against Spanish fishing companies must be set aside as incompatible with the European Communities Act 1972.

Bibliography:

Jennings, Ivor. Cabinet Government. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959.
The Law and the Constitution. 5th ed. London: University of London Press, 1959.
King, Anthony. The British Constitution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
McLean, Iain. What’s Wrong with the British Constitution? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

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