23 Jul 2018 | Judicial Power and the Left
In a recent post on this site ‘Judicial Power and the Left: A Short Response’ Professor Phil Syrpis welcomes the publication of Judicial Power and the Left whilst disagreeing with its general thrust. He judges it ‘far better [for the Left] to embrace a more legal, and...
29 May 2018 | Judicial Power and the Left
Judicial Power and the Left: Notes on a Sceptical Tradition is a stimulating and provocative selection of essays. It is part of Policy Exchange’s timely Judicial Power Project which focuses on the role of judges within the constitution. The voices in this collection...
26 Apr 2018 | Judicial Power and the Left
I have spent the last days reflecting on an excellent collection of short essays ‘Judicial Power and the Left’. The essays examine the relationship of the Left with the judiciary, and are best seen as a reaction against the Left’s (and here I quote from Jon Cruddas...
19 Apr 2018 | Judicial Power and the Left
The Judicial Power Project is on to something with its collection of a dozen essays, entitled Judicial Power and the Left published earlier this year. It is just that the something is not, in my opinion, a deepening of our understanding of judicial power or, at least,...
9 Jan 2018 | Judicial Power and the Left, Publications
The retreat towards the law and the continental constitutional separation of powers, and away from democracy and parliamentary sovereignty, have been very powerful tendencies within the left over the past fifty years. This collection of essays exposes this political...
9 Jan 2018 | Judicial Power and the Left, Publications
The constitutional kaleidoscope has been shaken and politics is in flux. One consequence of this is to bring into clearer focus changing patterns of political and legal thought, some of which have been a long time in the making. One such pattern is the erosion of the...
9 Jan 2018 | Judicial Power and the Left, Publications
It is hardly surprising if the attitude of the left — which I shall leave undefined, though I shall concentrate on the Labour Party — towards judicial power is not entirely friendly. Labour has always been a working-class party rooted in trade unionism, and,...
9 Jan 2018 | Judicial Power and the Left, Publications
Why is the British left so tolerant of the rise of judicial power? By ‘the left’, I refer to those in the Labour Party — a majority of members but minority of MPs — who supported the transformative election (and re-election) of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader. Whilst...
9 Jan 2018 | Judicial Power and the Left, Publications
The question posed by this title may seem meaningless — but it is not. The reason why it is posed is the underlying issue: why should judges be trusted more than other branches of government? Our eighteenth-century forebears, like Blackstone, thought of their...
9 Jan 2018 | Judicial Power and the Left, Publications
The moment of conception for British labour law might be traced to an act of great courage in Germany in 1933. Otto Kahn-Freund, a judge in the German Labour Court, upheld the dismissal claims of three employees of the Empire Radio Company. The dismissals had occurred...
9 Jan 2018 | Judicial Power and the Left, Publications
The objection to the courts on the labour left is based on the nature of law and the nature of the interests served by law. In common law systems, the judges are rule-makers and are indulged to a great extent as authors of the law, including a great deal of private...
9 Jan 2018 | Judicial Power and the Left, Publications
The political foundation of law In his great work, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, originally published in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War, E.H. Carr discussed at length the relationship between law and politics. His purpose was to explain why conflicts in...
9 Jan 2018 | Judicial Power and the Left, Publications
For a long time, many on the left were democratically suspicious of the European Economic Community (EEC), and its successor, the European Community (EC). As the primary organised expression of the left, the post-war Labour Party was dominated by those who wanted to...
9 Jan 2018 | Judicial Power and the Left, Publications
In the months after the US election last November, I often found myself arguing against people in America who thought that Trump and Brexit were the same phenomenon. On my view, Brexit was in fact an innoculation against Trump and the politics of the radical right....
9 Jan 2018 | Judicial Power and the Left, Publications
Introduction What role can courts play in furthering progressive social change? In the view of many lawyers, human rights activists, and left-leaning political activists, courts offer a golden pathway to justice and equality. In their view, courts can uphold rights...
9 Jan 2018 | Judicial Power and the Left, Publications
US Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black characterised courts as “havens of refuge for those who might otherwise suffer because they are helpless, weak, [or] outnumbered …”. This appealing view of the judiciary — as a reliable guardian of minority rights, and an...
9 Jan 2018 | Judicial Power and the Left, Publications
In the thirty years since the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was established, international economic agreements have intruded ever deeper into states’ regulatory and judicial domain, to the point that they now face a multi-faceted backlash. The popular discontent that...
