Law, Convention, and Precedent in the British Constitution

Abstract

Abstract It is a familiar fact that constitutional law is an elusive concept when it is applied to the British Constitution. For the great historian of English law, F. W. Maitland, writing at the beginning of this century, the definition of constitutional law was simply a matter of convenience and a question ‘not to be solved by appeal to authority’. The difficulty of identifying constitutional law in some hard and fast sense has not, however, prevented generations of scholars as well as practitioners in law and politics from arguing at length about what is constitutional and what is not, about the past development of the Constitution and where it is now going, and about how best either to preserve or to improve it. Since 1970 or thereabouts the Constitution has been discussed very much in terms of politics and government—that is to say, much of the writing on it has been concerned chiefly with decribing and explaining the political institutions through which the country is governed.