Fundamental Rights in the United Kingdom: The Law and the British Constitution

Abstract

I am honoured to have been invited to give this lecture and more grateful than words can express. It is a daunting invitation, especially when one recalls the demanding standards of the Owen J. Roberts Memorial Lectureship and the distinguished character of my predecessors. And it is a particular privilege for an Englishman-who is not a judge, a statesman, or a professor, but a practitioner at the English Bar-to have been asked to lecture in this historic birthplace of the Declaration of Independence during the year of the Bicentennial celebrations. I believe that Mr. Justice Roberts would have been interested by my theme. In his judicial capacity, he was a member of a divided Court that was called upon to reconcile the constitutional guarantees of personal liberty both with the proper allocation of power between the federal government and the states of the Union, and with the imperatives of a great modern industrial nation. His judicial experience would surely have made him interested in the way in which we, in the United Kingdom, have wrestled with analogous constitutional and legal problems, without a written constitution or a binding Bill of Rights. And his work for international federation and Atlantic union, after his retirement from the Supreme Court, indicates that he would have been fascinated by the constitutional and legal consequences of the creation of a European Community, inspired by the making of the United States.