Shaped by the Nuanced Constitution

Book excerpt: There is growing judicial, academic and political interest in the concept of common law constitutional rights. Concurrently, significant public law judgments, including R (Miller) v The Prime Minister, R (Begum) v Special Immigration Appeals Commission and R (Privacy International) v Investigatory Powers Tribunal, continue to sustain and enrich the academic debate on the nature of the UK constitution. Bringing these two highly topical themes together, the book argues, firstly, that neither common law constitutionalism nor political constitutionalism adequately captures the nature of public law litigation because neither is fully able to account for the co-existence and interplay between parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law. Advancing the idea of a 'nuanced' constitution instead, the book then provides an in-depth analysis of common law constitutional rights, looking at their history, conceptual foundations, contemporary characteristics, coverage and resilience. In doing so, this book highlights and re-conceptualises the dynamics and mechanisms of constitutional law adjudication and provides the first comprehensive critique of common law constitutional rights jurisprudence. It is centred around extensive case law analysis which focuses predominantly on recent Supreme Court judgments.