Constitutional government, parliamentary democracy and judicial power | Richard Ekins

5 Apr 2019 | Posts

On Sunday 31 March, Sir Stephen Laws and I published a paper for Policy Exchange entitled Endangering Constitutional Government: the risks of the House of Commons taking control. The paper warned that some MPs had begun to unravel the relationship between Government...

The High Court’s ‘right to rent’ decision is a travesty | Richard Ekins

2 Mar 2019 | Posts

The political campaign against the UK’s immigration laws secured an important victory yesterday, with the High Court denouncing sections 20-37 of the Immigration Act 2014 as racially discriminatory – not by discriminatory intent or design but “indirectly”, by side...

Richard Ekins submits evidence to Defence Committee inquiry on protecting veterans

25 Feb 2019 | News

Professor Richard Ekins, Head of the Judicial Power Project, has submitted evidence to the House of Commons Defence Committee’s inquiry into the question of how former service personnel can be protected from the spectre of investigation and re-investigation for...

Why Brexit won’t lead to a bonfire of human rights | Richard Ekins

14 Feb 2019 | Posts

Faced with the prospect of the UK’s departure from the EU, some Britons are contemplating urgent measures, whether applying for an Irish passport or migrating to New Zealand. Nothing wrong with either, of course, but the latter is an odd reaction. After all, one of...

Legislated Rights: An introduction | Grégoire Webber and Paul Yowell

14 Feb 2019 | Legislated Rights

The guiding aim of legislatures should be to protect and promote human rights. This might seem a common sense or obvious proposition. But there are some theorists and judges who reject it, holding that human rights are the province of courts while the task of...

Legislated Rights: Comment by Beverley McLachlin

14 Feb 2019 | Legislated Rights

Legislated Rights makes an important contribution to contemporary rights scholarship. Taking the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as its starting point, it explores how legislatures can and should play an active role in ensuring that people enjoy rights, not just...

Legislated Rights: Comment by JD Heydon

14 Feb 2019 | Legislated Rights

The central thesis of this profound and thoughtful book is the crucial role of the legislature in securing and promoting human rights. The arguments command strong assent. There are many, many parts of it which are fundamental and devastating. There is, however, an...

Legislated Rights: Comment by Sir Ross Cranston

14 Feb 2019 | Legislated Rights

I very much welcome the book’s overall theme that legislation gives effect to and protects human rights. It seems incredible that the UK’s leading judge should have thought that until the advent of the European Convention of Human Rights in 1951 UK law did not...

Legislated Rights: Comment by Chief Justice Glenn Joyal

14 Feb 2019 | Legislated Rights

Legislated Rights is an important and essential addition to the library of anyone seeking to better understand the potential role of and justification for legislatures engaging in the protection and promotion of human rights. By skillfully explaining and building upon...

Legislated Rights: A reply to judicial commentators | Grégoire Webber and Paul Yowell

14 Feb 2019 | Legislated Rights

Legislated Rights: Securing Human Rights through Legislation challenges ideas that find ready support in the case law of European and Commonwealth courts and the academic literature. We are grateful to our distinguished commentators, who have a wealth of judicial...

The Author Responds | Paul Yowell

29 Jan 2019 | Constitutional Rights and Constitutional Design

I am enormously grateful to the distinguished judges and scholars who have read and engaged with my book Constitutional Rights and Constitutional Design, and appreciate both the praise and criticism. In this reply I respond to some points they raise. As I write, news...

Constitutional Rights and Constitutional Design: An online symposium on Paul Yowell’s new book

13 Dec 2018 | Constitutional Rights and Constitutional Design

The global expansion of judicial power means that courts around the world are increasingly called on to settle matters of moral and political controversy, including assisted suicide, data privacy, anti-terrorism measures, marriage, and abortion. But doubts regarding...

Synopsis of Constitutional Rights and Constitutional Design | Paul Yowell

13 Dec 2018 | Constitutional Rights and Constitutional Design

Almost every country in the world has legislation that prohibits physician-assisted suicide. The UK Parliament voted overwhelmingly to maintain its prohibition of the practice in 2015 (330 to 118), but the law has been challenged in recent cases (Conway and...

Constitutional Tradeoffs | by Adrian Vermeule

13 Dec 2018 | Constitutional Rights and Constitutional Design

Paul Yowell’s Constitutional Rights and Constitutional Design is a superb book, with a kind of lapidary intelligence. I think it advances the conversation in two ways, methological and substantive. Methodologically, it pursues the comparative-institutional method,...

Responsible Choices about Constitutional Design | Richard Ekins

13 Dec 2018 | Constitutional Rights and Constitutional Design

Constitutional Rights and Constitutional Design is a wonderful book – full of riches, concise, tightly argued, and carefully interwoven.  It is itself a model of careful design as well as a study of the absence (or failure) of constitutional design and a prescription...

The Challenge of Integrating Theory and Practice| Professor Erin Delaney

13 Dec 2018 | Constitutional Rights and Constitutional Design

Sed quid custodes ipso custodiet? Who will guard the guardians? The question is not posed until nearly the end of this impressive new book, but it is clear from the outset that Paul Yowell is animated by a deep concern about the exercise of judicial power. He taps...

Institutional Incapacity and the Bounds of Judicial Power | Justice Malcolm Wallis

13 Dec 2018 | Constitutional Rights and Constitutional Design

Do courts and judges have the institutional capacity needed to settle the kinds of morally and politically controversial issues that arise in constitutional rights cases? Paul Yowell argues that the institutional setting of a court is lacking in basic capacities for...

Courts as a Forum for Reviewing Empirical Data and Moral Reasons | Judge Ioannis Sarmas

13 Dec 2018 | Constitutional Rights and Constitutional Design

Ι Justice Scalia’s criticism of the ‘living Constitution’ interpretive theory highlighted the dangers facing the democratic process from the judicial approach whereby terms used in the Constitution are perceived, not in the sense they had when they were adopted, but...

Policy Exchange’s Judicial Power Project submits evidence to Joint Committee on Human Rights inquiry on the 20th anniversary of the Human Rights Act 1998

22 Oct 2018 | News

Richard Ekins (University of Oxford and Head of the Judicial Power Project) and Graham Gee (University of Sheffield) have submitted written evidence to the inquiry by Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights on 20 Years of the Human Rights Act. Download our...

Commentary on Sir Noel Malcolm’s “Human Rights and Political Wrongs”

22 Mar 2018 | Human Rights and Political Wrongs

In his recent study for Policy Exchange’s Judicial Power Project, Sir Noel Malcolm (All Souls College, Oxford) considers European Human Rights law and finds it wanting. The European Court of Human Rights, he argues, operates on principles that are incoherent and...

Noel Malcolm | Between Human Rights Theory and Practice: A Reply to Five Commentators

22 Mar 2018 | Human Rights and Political Wrongs

I am very grateful to these five distinguished authors (Professor Finnis, Baroness O’Neill, Lord Phillips, Professor Tasioulas and Professor Verdirame) for taking the time and trouble to comment on my work. Without writing at even greater length, I cannot deal with...

Guglielmo Verdirame | Which theory? Whose bill of rights?

13 Mar 2018 | Human Rights and Political Wrongs

The Human Rights Act (HRA) has been a centrepiece of the British Constitution for almost twenty years. The idea that, over 300 years after the 1688 Bill of Rights, Britain should have a new bill of rights was laudable. But its implementation was a failure of legal and...

John Tasioulas | Feeling our Way: Human Rights as Democratic Beliefs

9 Mar 2018 | Human Rights and Political Wrongs

Chapter 5 of Sir Noel Malcolm’s Human Rights and Political Wrongs examines leading moral-philosophical theories of human rights and issues a damning verdict. Their advocates, according to Malcolm, are just ‘whistling in the dark’. By contrast, he...

John Finnis | Judicial Usurpation and Human Rights

8 Mar 2018 | Human Rights and Political Wrongs

Human Rights and Political Wrongs gives us an unrivalled explanatory checklist of the ways in which the European Court of Human Rights (and so any court that takes its cue from the ECtHR) has expanded the power of judges to declare that laws adopted in a civilized,...

Lord Phillips | Strasbourg Overreach and ECHR Membership

7 Mar 2018 | Human Rights and Political Wrongs

In this book Sir Noel Malcolm advances three propositions. The first is that there is no moral or philosophical basis for human rights; they are essentially political. The second is that the jurisprudence of the Strasbourg Court has been unsatisfactory. The third is...

Baroness O’Neill | The Importance of Justifying Rights

6 Mar 2018 | Human Rights and Political Wrongs

Noel Malcolm is surely right both that human rights standards are important, and that accounts of human rights are currently in some trouble. I think that he is also right that some of these troubles have been brought about not by those who are hostile to or who...

Does Political Criticism Of Judges Damage Judicial Independence?

2 Mar 2018 | Judicial Review and Judicial Independence

In a new paper for Policy Exchange’s Judicial Power Project the Honourable Dyson Heydon AC QC, former Justice of the High Court of Australia, asks Does Political Criticism of Judges Damage Judicial Independence? In the paper, Mr Heydon challenges the conventional...

Enclaves and Exclaves: Limits and exceptions to the doctrine of judicial review

1 Mar 2018 | Judicial Review and Judicial Independence

The Honourable Dyson Heydon AC QC, former Justice of the High Court of Australia and one of the common-law world’s foremost figures, considered the rise of judicial review around the world in an event at Policy Exchange. Heydon warned that the phenomenon of rising...

Judicial Power Project submits evidence to Joint Committee on Human Rights inquiry

26 Feb 2018 | News

Representatives of Policy Exchange’s Judicial Power Project have submitted written evidence to the inquiry by Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights, Human Rights: Attitudes to Enforcement. The evidence was complied by Professor Richard Ekins, the...

Anthony Speaight | Data Retention, National Security and the ECJ: The Continuing Saga

6 Feb 2018 | Posts

The latest judgment in the saga of data retention provides further evidence of the problems and uncertainties created by the European Court of Justice. First a recap on the story so far. Since the dawn of telecommunications the companies involved have been recording...